Spider -- Programmable spidering of web sites with node.js and jQuery

Install

From source:

  git clone git://github.com/mikeal/spider.git 
  cd spider
  npm link ../spider

(How to use the) API

Creating a Spider

  var spider = require('spider');
  var s = spider();

spider(options)

The options object can have the following fields:

• maxSockets - Integer containing the maximum amount of sockets in the pool. Defaults to 4.
• userAgent - The User Agent String to be sent to the remote server along with our request. Defaults to Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/7.0.517.41 Safari/534.7 (firefox userAgent String).
• cache - The Cache object to be used as cache. Defaults to NoCache, see code for implementation details for a new Cache object.
• pool - A hash object containing the agents for the requests. If omitted the requests will use the global pool which is set to maxSockets.

Adding a Route Handler

spider.route(hosts, pattern, cb)

Where the params are the following :

• hosts - A string -- or an array of string -- representing the host part of the targeted URL(s).
• pattern - The pattern against which spider tries to match the remaining (pathname + search + hash) of the URL(s).
• cb - A function of the form function(window, $) where
  • this - Will be a variable referencing the Routes.match return object/value with some other goodies added from spider. For more info see https://github.com/aaronblohowiak/routes.js
  • window - Will be a variable referencing the document's window.
  • $ - Will be the variable referencing the jQuery Object.

Queuing an URL for spider to fetch.

spider.get(url) where url is the url to fetch.

Extending / Replacing the MemoryCache

Currently the MemoryCache must provide the following methods:

• get(url, cb) - Returns url's body field via the cb callback/continuation if it exists. Returns null otherwise.
  • cb - Must be of the form function(retval) {...}
• getHeaders(url, cb) - Returns url's headers field via the cb callback/continuation if it exists. Returns null otherwise.
  • cb - Must be of the form function(retval) {...}
• set(url, headers, body) - Sets/Saves url's headers and body in the cache.

Setting the verbose/log level

spider.log(level) - Where level is a string that can be any of "debug", "info", "error"