PHP Composer Packages for Crawler and Scraper Development
crwlr.software is a collection of open source PHP composer packages that provide the necessary tools to build web crawlers and scrapers. The crawler package contains everything and helps you build crawlers as fast as possible. There are also sub-packages that you can use standalone.
Packages
crwlr / crawler
The main package of this collection, providing kind of a framework and a lot of ready to use, so-called steps, that you can use to build your own web crawlers and scrapers with.
crwlr / url
The Swiss Army knife for urls. Parses urls to components (scheme, host, domain, path,...). You can access and modify url components, compare components of different urls and resolve relative to absolute urls. Also supports internationalized domain names.
crwlr / query-string
This library provides a very convenient API to create, access and manipulate query strings used in HTTP GET (as part of the URL) or POST (as part of the body) requests.
crwlr / robots-txt
Use this library within crawler and scraper programs to parse robots.txt files and check if your crawler user-agent is allowed to load certain paths.
Latest Blog Posts
Dealing with HTTP (Url) Query Strings in PHP
2022-06-02
There is a new package in town called query-string. It allows to create, access and manipulate query strings for HTTP requests in a very convenient way. Here's a quick overview of what you can do with it and also how it can be used via the url package.
» Read moreWhat's new in crwlr / crawler v0.4
2022-05-10
Last friday version 0.4 of the crawler package was released with some pretty useful improvements. Read what's shipped with this new minor update.
» Read moreWhat's new in crwlr / crawler v0.2 and v0.3
2022-04-30
There are already two new 0.x versions of the crawler package. Here a quick summary of what's new in versions 0.2 and 0.3.
» Read moreRelease of crwlr / crawler v0.1.0
2022-04-18
After months of hard work, today I'm finally releasing the first version (v0.1.0) of the crwlr / crawler package. Here some information on what it is, its state and current and future features.
» Read morePrevent Homograph Attacks using the crwlr / url Package
2022-01-19
Homograph attacks are using internationalized domain names (IDN) for malicious links including domains that look like trusted organizations. You can use the crwlr Url class to detect and monitor urls containing IDNs in your user's input.
» Read moreWhy I start crwlr.software
2018-04-15
This is just a short introduction to what crwlr.software is and will become in the future and why you may like it.
» Read more