What's new in StormCrawler 1.11

I've just released StormCrawler 1.11, here are the main changes, some of which require modifications of your configuration.

Users should upgrade to this version as it fixes several bugs and adds loads of functionalities.

Dependency upgrades

• Tika 1.19.1 (#606)
• Elasticsearch 6.4.1 (#607)
• SOLR 7.5 (#624)
• OKHttp 3.11.0

Core

• /bugfix/ FetcherBolts original metadata overwrites metadata returned by protocol (#636)
• Override Globally Configured Accepts and Accepts-Language Headers Per-URL  (#634)
• Support for cookies in okhttp implementation (#632)
• AbstractHttpProtocol uses StringTabScheme to parse input into URL and Metadata  (#631)
• Improve MimeType detection for interpreted server-side languages (#630)
• /bugfix/ Custom intervals in Scheduler can't contain dots  (#616)
• OKHTTP protocol trust all SSL certificates (#615)
• HTTPClient protocol setDefaultMaxPerRoute based on max threads per queue (#594)
• Fetcher Added byteLength to Metadata (#599)
• URLFilters + ParseFilters refactoring (#593)
• HTTPClient Add simple basic auth system (#589)

WARC

• /bugfix/ WARCHdfsBolt writes zero byte files (#596)

SOLR

• SOLR StatusUpdater use short status name (#627)
• SOLRSpout log queries, time and number of results (#623)
• SOLR spout - reuse nextFetchDate (#622)
• Move reset.fetchdate.after to AbstractQueryingSpout (#628)
• Abstract functionalities of spout implementations (#617) - see below

SQL

• MetricsConsumer (#612)
• Batch PreparedStatements in SQL status updater bolt, fixes (#610)
• QLSpout group by hostname and get top N results (#609)
• Harmonise param names for SQL (#619)
• Move reset.fetchdate.after to AbstractQueryingSpout (#628)
• Abstract functionalities of spout implementations (#617) - see below

Elasticsearch

• /bugfix/ NPE in AggregationSpout when there is not any status index created (#597)
• /bugfix/ NPE in CollapsingSpout (#595)
• Added ability to implement custom indexes names based on metadata information (#591)
• StatusMetricsBolt - Added check for avoid NPE when interacting with multi search response  (#598)
• Change default value of es.status.reset.fetchdate.after (#590)
• Log error if elastic search reports an unexpected problem (#575)
• ES Wrapper for URLFilters implementing JSONResource (#588)
• Move reset.fetchdate.after to AbstractQueryingSpout (#628)
• Abstract functionalities of spout implementations (#617) - see below

As you've probably noticed, #617 affects ES, SOLR as well as SQL. The idea behind it is that the spout in these modules have a lot in common as they all query a backend for URLs to fetch. We moved some of the functionalities to a brand new class AbstractQueryingSpout, which greatly reduces the amount of code. The handling of the URL caching, TTL for the purgatory and min delay between queries is now done in that class. As a result, the spouts implementations have less to do and can focus on the specifics of getting the data from their respective backends. A nice side effect is that the SQL and SOLR spouts now benefit from some of the functionalities which were up to now only available in ES.

You will need to update your configuration to replace the elements which were specific to ES by the generic ones i.e. spout.reset.fetchdate.after, spout.ttl.purgatory and spout.min.delay.queries. These are also used by SOLR and SQL. 

Please note that these changes also impact some of the metrics names.

Coming next...

Storm 2.0.0 should be released soon, which is very exciting! There's a branch of StormCrawler which anticipates some of the changes, even though it hasn't been tested much yet. Give it a try if you want to be on the cutting edge!

I expect the SOLR and SQL backends to get further improvements and progressively catch up with our Elasticsearch resources.

Finally, our Bristol workshop next month is now full but there is one in Vilnius on 27/11. I'll also give a talk there the following day. If you are around, come and say hi and get yourself a StormCrawler sticker.

As usual, thanks to all contributors and users. Happy crawling!

What's new in StormCrawler 1.10

StormCrawler 1.9 is only a couple of weeks old but the new functionalities added since justify a new release.

Dependency upgrades

• Apache Storm 1.2.2 (#583)
• Crawler-Commons 0.10 (#580)
• Elasticsearch 6.3.0 (#587)

Archetype

• parsefilters: added CommaSeparatedToMultivaluedMetadata to split parse.keywords
• bugfix: java topology in archetype does not use FeedParserBolt, fixes #551
• bugfix: archetype - move SC dependency to first place to avoid STORM-2428, fixes #559

Elasticsearch

• IndexerBolt set pipeline via config (#584)
• Wrapper for loading JSON-based ParseFilters from ES (#569) - see below

Core

• SimpleFetcherBolt to send URLs back to its own queue if time to wait above threshold (#582)
• ParseFilter to tag a document based on pattern matching on its URL (#577)
• New URL filter implementation based on JSON file and organised per hostname or domain #578

Let's have a closer look at some of the points above.

The CollectionTagger is a ParseFilter provides a similar functionality to what Collections are in Google Search Appliance, namely the ability to add a key value in the metadata based on the URL of a document matching one or more regular expressions. The rules are expressed in a JSON file and look like 

{

   "collections": [{

            "name": "stormcrawler",

            "includePatterns": ["http://stormcrawler.net/.+"]

        },

        {

            "name": "crawler",

            "includePatterns": [".+crawler.+", ".+nutch.+"],

            "excludePatterns": [".+baby.+", ".+spider.+"]

        }

    ]

}

Please note that the format is different from what GSA does but it can achieve the same thing. 

So far, nothing revolutionary, the resource file gets loaded from the uber-jar, just like any other resource. However, what we introduced at the same time is the interface JSONResource, which CollectionTagger implements. This interface defines how implementations load a JSON file to build their resources.

Here comes the interesting bit. We added a new resource for Elasticsearch in #569 called JSONResourceWrapper. As the name suggests, this wraps any ParseFilter implementing JSONResource and delegates the filtering to it. What it also does, is that it allows loading the JSON resource from an Elasticsearch document instead of the uber-jar and reloads it periodically. This allows you to update a resource without having to recompile the uber-jar and restart the topology. 

The wrapper is configured in the usual way i.e via the parsefilter.json file, like so

{

 "class": "com.digitalpebble.stormcrawler.elasticsearch.parse.filter.JSONResourceWrapper",

     "name": "ESCollectionTagger",

     "params": {

         "refresh": "60",

         "delegate": {

             "class": "com.digitalpebble.stormcrawler.parse.filter.CollectionTagger",

             "params": {

                 "file": "collections.json"

             }

         }

     }

 }

The JSONResourceWrapper also needs to know where Elasticsearch lives. This is set via the usual configuration file:

  es.config.addresses: "localhost"

  es.config.index.name: "config"

  es.config.doc.type: "config"

  es.config.settings:

    cluster.name: "elasticsearch"

You can then push a modified version of the resources to Elasticsearch e.g. with CURL

curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/config/config/collections.json?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @collections.json

Another resource we introduced in this release is the FastURLFilter, which also implements JSONResource (but as there isn't a Wrapper for URLFilters yet, can't be loaded from ES). This is similar to the existing URL filter we have in that it allows to remove URLs based on regular expressions, however, it organises the rules per domain or hostname which makes it more efficient as a URL doesn't have to be checked against all the patterns, just the ones for its domain. There is even a scope based on metadata key/values, for instance, if some of your seeds were organised by collection, as well as a global scope which is tried for all URLs if nothing else matched.

The resource file looks like 

[

       {

"scope": "GLOBAL",

"patterns": [

"DenyPathQuery \\.jpg"

]

},

{

"scope": "domain:stormcrawler.net",

"patterns": [

"AllowPath /digitalpebble/",

"DenyPath .+"

]

},

{

"scope": "metadata:key=value",

"patterns": [

"DenyPath .+"

]

}

]

where the Query suffix indicates whether the pattern should be matched against the path + query element or just the path.

I hope you like this new release of StormCrawler and the new features it brings. I would like to thank all the users and contributors and particularly the Government of Northwest Territories in Canada who kindly donated some of the code of the CollectionTagger.

Happy Crawling!

 

What's new in StormCrawler 1.9

Dependency upgrades

• OKHttp 3.10.0 #546
• JSoup 1.11.2 #552
• icu4j 61.1 #556
• Rometools 1.9.0 #556
• HTTPClient 4.5.5 #558
• Tika 1.18 #566

Core

• Crawl-delay in robots.txt should optionally not shrink the configured delay #549
• Optimisation: faster extraction of META tags #553
• CollectionMetric synchronized access to List #555
• Configurable Robots Caches #557
• JSOUPParserBolt: lazy DOM conversion #563
• Purge internal queues of tuples which have already reached timeout #564
• Added ParseFilter to convert single valued Metadata to multi-valued ones #571
• Caching of redirected robots.txt may overwrite correct robots.txt rules, fixes #573

WARC

• WARCBolt to handle incorrect URIs gracefully #560
• WARCRecordFormat use ByteBuffer instead of ByteArrayOutputStream #561

Archetype

• Uses flux-core 1.2.1 #559
• Added FeedParser to archetype topology #551
• Added .kml and .wmv to url filters

SOLR

• MetricsConsumer handles recursive values #554

Elasticsearch

• MetricsConsumer handles recursive values #554
• ES Indexer and Deletion Bolts to get index name from constructor #572

LanguageID

• Added option to LanguageID to skip if metadata already set #570

As usual, we advise all users to move to this version as it fixes several bugs. Thanks to all contributors and users. Happy crawling!

Grafana StormCrawler metrics v4

The Grafana dashboard for StormCrawler is a good starting point for monitoring the behaviour of your StormCrawler topology. This is typically used with Elasticsearch as a storage backend for the metrics generated by Storm but should work with any other Storm-compatible backend like Grafite or CloudWatch. 

Some of the metrics are specific to the components from the Elasticsearch module (spout, status, indexer) but you can simply remove or modify them if you use e.g. SOLR (NOTE: there was a feature request in Grafana to add SOLR as a datasource but to my knowledge, this is not yet available).

The latest version (4) brings the following changes.

• URLs waiting in queues 

The recent 1.8 release of StormCrawler added a new metrics for the FetcherBolt which allows tracking the amount of time URLs spend in the internal queues. This has been added to the "URLs waiting in queues" panel alongside the average population of the queues.

Average time spent in queues + average queues population

• ES StatusUpdater

Instead of tracking the number of bulk requests sent in the last minute, we now have a panel showing the evolution over time. This information is for the ES StatusUpdaterBolt only.

ES status updater bulk requests

• Acked in StatusBolt

This is a brand new panel which is not specific to Elasticsearch but operates on any component with 'status' for id and shows the number of tuples acked over time, broken down by source.  

Tuples acked by StatusUpdater

In the graph above, we can see a peak early in the crawl where most of the tuples acked came from the sitemap bolt. Please note that the values are stacked in this graph. Sitemap files are typically discovered early in a crawl and generate a large number of discovered URLs; this is not the case later on when most tuples come from the HTML parser.

• Robots panel

We removed the robots panel as the number of HTTP requests to robots files is shown in the "Fetcher: pages fetched" panel anyway and after the initial few minutes of a crawl, the panel simply indicated that the robots files were mostly cached.

• ES Indexed 

This is a new panel showing the number of documents indexed into Elasticsearch as well as the documents filtered out during the indexing.

What's new in StormCrawler 1.8

I have just released StormCrawler 1.8. As usual, here is a summary of the main changes:


Dependency updates

• Storm 1.2.1 #531
• SOLR 7.2.1 #528
• Tika 1.17 #518
• Elasticsearch 6.2.2 #525 and #539

Core

• Add option to send only N bytes of text to indexers #476
• BasicURLNormalizer to optionally convert IDN host names to ASCII/Punycode #522
• MemorySpout to generate tuples with DISCOVERED status #529
• OKHttp configure type of proxy #530
• http.content.limit inconsistent default to -1 #534
• Track time spent in the FetcherBolt queues #535
• Increase detect.charset.maxlength default value #537
• FeedParserBolt: metadata added by parse filters not passed forward in topology #541
• Use UTF-8 for input encoding of seeds (FileSpout) #542
• Default URL filter: exclude localhost and private address spaces #543
• URLStreamGrouping returns the taskIDs and not their index #547

WARC

• Upgrade WARC module to 1.1.0 version of storm-hdfs, fixes #520

SOLR

• Schema for status index needs date type for nextFetchDate #544
• SOLR indexer: use field type text for content field #545

Elasticsearch

• AggregationSpout fails with default value of es.status.bucket.field == _routing #521
• Move to Elasticsearch RESTAPi #539

We recommend all users to move to this version as it fixes several bugs (#541, #547) and adds some great new features. In particular, the use of the REST API for Elasticsearch, which makes the module future-proof but also easier to configure, but also #535 and #543.

As usual, thanks to all contributors and users. Happy crawling!

What's new in StormCrawler 1.7

Amazingly this is the 20th release of StormCrawler! Here are the main changes:

Dependencies updates

• crawler-commons 0.9 #513

Core

• (bugfix) ParserBolts should use outlinks from parsefilters #498
• LD_JSON parsefilter #501
• okhttp : store request and response headers verbatim in metadata #506
• (bugfix) okhttp protocol does not store headers in metadata #507
• HTTP clients should handle http.accept.language and http.accept #499
• Selenium protocol follows redirections #514
• RemoteDriverProtocol needs multiple instances #505
• SitemapParserBolt should force mime-type based on the clue #515

Elasticsearch

• ES Spout : define filter query via config #502
• Upgrade to ES 6.0 #517

We recommend all users to move to this version. If you wish to remain on an older version of Elasticsearch, you can simply keep your existing version of the stormcrawler elasticsearch module while upgrading stormcrawler core.

This version improves the processing of sitemaps, via #515 and the use of the crawler-commons 0.9 where we fixed the SAX parsing and extended its coverage. We also added improvements to our okhttp-based protocol implementation. If your crawl is a wide one with potentially any sort of content then you should go for okhttp over the default httpclient one. See our comparison of protocol implementations on the WIKI.

Finally, if you want to extract semantic data represented in ld-json then you'll love #501.

As usual, thanks to all contributors and users. Happy crawling!

What's new in StormCrawler 1.6

Dependencies updates

• jsoup 1.10.3
• crawler-commons 0.8

Core

• Use ISO representation of time for modifiedtime in adaptivescheduler  #496
• Use ISO representation of time for discoveryDate and lastProcessedDate, #477
• Improved Charset Detection #495
• SitemapParserBolt configure use SAX or not
• SitemapParserBolt generates metrics for average processing time
• HTTP protocol based on OKHTTP #484 
• Apache Http client can use HEAD method on a per URL basis #485
• ContentFilter to leave trace of the pattern that matched #480
• Metadata has a new public method for getting first non-empty value from a set of keys
• Added ARTICLE to patterns for content filter

LangID

• Can add more than one lang code based on configurable prob threshold. #481

WARC

•  Added rotation policy based on time and filesize

ES

• ES: added es.status.reset.fetchdate.after #478
• Removed Grafana resources - can be downloaded from Grafana portal