spyglass-netrunner

netrunner

netrunner is a tool to help build, validate, & create archives for Spyglass lenses.

Lenses are a simple set of rules that tell a crawler which URLs it should crawl. Combined w/ data from sitemaps and/or the Internet Archive, netrunner can crawl and created an archive of the pages represented by the lens.

In Spyglass, this is used to create a personalized search engine that only crawls & indexes sites/pages/data that you're interested in.

Installing the CLI

From crates.io:

cargo install spyglass-netrunner

or from source:

cargo install --path .

Running the CLI

netrunner 0.2.0
Andrew Huynh <andrew@spyglass.fyi>
A small CLI utility to help build lenses for spyglass

Usage: netrunner [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Commands:
  check-domain  Print out useful information about a domain, such as whether there is an rss feed, an robots.txt, and a sitemap
  check-urls    Grabs all the URLs represented by <lens-file> for review
  clean         Removes temporary directories/files
  crawl         Crawls & creates a web archive for the pages represented by <lens-file>
  validate      Validate the lens file and, if available, the cached web archive for <lens-file>
  help          Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -l, --lens-file <FILE>            Lens file
  -s, --s3-bucket <S3_BUCKET_NAME>  Upload finished archive to S3
  -h, --help                        Print help information
  -V, --version                     Print version information

Commands in depth

check-domain

This will run through a couple checks for a particular domain, pulling out URL paths (if available) to robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and any RSS feeds for the domain. This data is used in the check-urls and crawl commands to create the WARC for a particular lens.

check-urls

This command will grab all the urls represented by this lens. This will be gathered in either of two ways:

1. Sitemap(s) for the domain(s) represented. If available, the tool will prioritize using sitemaps or

2. Using data from the Internet Archive to determine what URLs are represented by the rules in the lens.

The list will then be sorted alphabetically and outputted to stdout. This is a great way to check whether the URLs that will be crawled & indexed are what you're expecting for a lens.

crawl

This will use the rules defined in the lens to crawl & archive the pages within.

This is primarily used as way to create cached web archives that can be distributed w/ community created lenses so that others don't have to crawl the same pages.

validate

This will validate the rules inside a lens file and, if previouisly crawled, the cached web archive for this lens.