Crawl Workflows¶
Crawl Workflows consist of a list of configuration options that instruct the crawler what it should capture.
Creating and Editing Crawl Workflows¶
New Crawl Workflows can be created from the Crawling page. A detailed breakdown of available settings can be found here.
Status¶
Crawl Workflows inherit the status of the last item they created. When a workflow has been instructed to run it can have have five possible states:
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Waiting | The workflow can't start running yet but it is queued to run when resources are available. |
| Starting | New resources are starting up. Crawling should begin shortly. |
| Running | The crawler is finding and capturing pages! |
| Stopping | A user has instructed this workflow to stop. Finishing capture of the current pages. |
| Finishing Crawl | The workflow has finished crawling and data is being packaged into WACZ files. |
| Uploading WACZ | WACZ files have been created and are being transferred to storage. |
Running Crawl Workflows¶
Crawl workflows can be run from the actions menu of the workflow in the crawl workflow list, or by clicking the Run Crawl button on the workflow's details page.
While crawling, the Watch Crawl page displays a list of queued URLs that will be visited, and streams the current state of the browser windows as they visit pages from the queue.
Running a crawl workflow that has successfully run previously can be useful to capture content as it changes over time, or to run with an updated Crawl Scope.
Live Exclusion Editing¶
While exclusions can be set before running a crawl workflow, sometimes while crawling the crawler may find new parts of the site that weren't previously known about and shouldn't be crawled, or get stuck browsing parts of a website that automatically generate URLs known as "crawler traps".
If the crawl queue is filled with URLs that should not be crawled, use the Edit Exclusions button on the Watch Crawl page to instruct the crawler what pages should be excluded from the queue.
Exclusions added while crawling are applied to the same exclusion table saved in the workflow's settings and will be used the next time the crawl workflow is run unless they are manually removed.
Changing the Amount of Crawler Instances¶
Like exclusions, the crawler instance scale can also be adjusted while crawling. On the Watch Crawl page, press the Edit Crawler Instances button, and set the desired value.
Unlike exclusions, this change will not be applied to future workflow runs.
Ending a Crawl¶
If a crawl workflow is not crawling websites as intended it may be preferable to end crawling operations and update the crawl workflow's settings before trying again. There are two operations to end crawls, available both on the workflow's details page, or as part of the actions menu in the workflow list.
Stopping¶
Stopping a crawl will throw away the crawl queue but otherwise gracefully end the process and save anything that has been collected. Stopped crawls show up in the list of Archived Items and can be used like any other item in the app.
Canceling¶
Canceling a crawl will throw away all data collected and immediately end the process. Canceled crawls do not show up in the list of Archived Items, though a record of the runtime and workflow settings can be found in the crawl workflow's list of crawls.