Walk

What is this project?

Walk is a sitemapping tool. It's designed to crawl and snapshot sitemaps from URLs in order to understand how sites change over time.

Current status: Design & prototyping phase

Key user: EDGI web monitoring analysts, who want to understand changes in the structure of sites, and particularly look out for "islanding" (when a web resource still exists at a URL but is no longer linked to from anywhere)

How to get involved:

• Reach out over Slack or
• Make an issue on this repo to explain your interest or use case

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Building from source

To build Walk you'll need the go programming language on your machine.

$ go get github.com/qri-io/walk
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/qri-io/walk
$ make install

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Architecture

Minimum viable version

Walk is written as a library accessed through a command line interface (CLI). It takes a configuration file and returns a sitemap in NDJSON (newline-delimited JSON).

Basic architecture

There are two major components of Walk:

1. Crawler: takes a URL and spits out linked URLs
2. Coordinator/result handler: orchestrates and takes the output of crawls, maintains global state

The crawler crawls just one level (links from one particular page) at a time. The results are then sent to the coordinator/result handler, which performs some minimal processing (e.g. de-duplication of lists of returned URLs) and queues the next iterations of crawling.

Interaction

Walk's coordinator runs on a cloud server in order to minimize potential disruption of a job.

Jobs can be queued to the server through a REST API (http) or through the server flag in the CLI.

Set in a broader vision

Walk is a modular system of components. It begins as a crawler/sitemapper, building snapshots of URL links.

From that foundation, it should be able to grow into a web scraper (takes URL and gives list of resources mapped to content).

The grandest vision of Walk is a tool that can take in a BIG list of URLs (30k+), reliably snapshot both sitemaps and webpage resources, and export the results into a number of formats. It is intended as a shared resource for many projects.

System diagram:

(Diagram notes: System components are in square-edged boxes, while the format of data being sent between them is in round-edged boxes. Open questions highlighted in green.)