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goldsmiths-search-engine

CLI utility used to search for occurrences of strings across all indexed pages on gold.ac.uk

Installation

Clone repo

Clone this repo into your project directory.

git clone https://github.com/antoni-devlin/goldsmiths-search-engine.git

Create python virtual environment

cd into the project directory, and create a python virtual environment. Below is a simple example, but do it however you like.

cd goldsmiths-search-engine
python3 -m venv venv

Activate the venv

source venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies using pip

pip install -r requirements.txt

Optionally change permissions on scrape.py

If you would like to be able to run the script using

./scrape.py

instead of

python scrape.py

you'll need to make the script executable

chmod +x scrape.py

Usage

All commands need to be run from within the project directory. This is the most basic use of the tool:

./scrape.py "search term"

This will crawl every page specified in the hardcoded sitemap, and write a list of a list of matches in the terminal.

Flags

CLI arguments are defined in parsing_definitions.py, then imported into scrape.py. Currently available are:

  • -u, --Url-Filters Lets you specify plaintext patterns to filter sitemap urls by (e.g. /ug/, /pg/, /careers/.) This isn't very sofisticated – it only checks whether the specified strings are present in the url, then parses it if they are. Use with caution.
  • -d, --Debug Used for debugging. Will print out all arguments you set, without running a search (like a dry run).
  • -po, --printoutput Prints real-time output to terminal as well as writing it to csv. This replaces the .'s that usually track progress.
  • -n, --outputname Give a custom filename for the results csv (wrapped in quotes.) The .csv file extension is added automatically.

It's usually better to filter a given CSV file for URLs after running your search than relying on my janky filtering logic. You've been warned!

Custom sitemap format

A custom sitemap.csv must be in the following format:

url,
https://www.domain.com,
https://www.gold.ac.uk,

It can have more columns than just url to the right, but these aren't parsed by the script. The "url" column header is required.

To Do

  • Autoregenerate sitemap if enough time has passed since last search.
  • Add flag to regenerate sitemap before execution.
  • Allow users to specify custom sitemap path using command line flag.
  • Add writing results to csv automatically.