PHP Composer Packages for Crawler and Scraper Development

2025-01-20

Have you ever deployed your website or web app, only to discover hours later that you’ve introduced bugs or broken links? Or do you clear the cache with every deploy, leaving the first users to experience slow performance? In this guide, you’ll learn how to use a crawler to automatically detect errors and warm the cache, ensuring your site runs smoothly after every deployment.

2024-06-05

Version 1.8 of the crwlr/crawler package is out now, featuring important new functions that will replace existing ones in v2.0. There was one problem that I sometimes received negative feedback about and that I was unhappy with myself: the way composing crawling result data worked. I have now found a solution that I am quite happy with. The new functionality will lead to better performance, further minimized memory usage, and will hopefully be a lot easier to understand.

2024-06-05

To optimize memory usage, the crwlr/crawler library leverages PHP's Generators. If you want to write a custom step for your crawler, the step must return a Generator. Since working with generators can be a bit tricky if you are new to them, this post offers an intro on how to use them and highlights common pitfalls to avoid.

2023-11-16

This is the first article of our "Crwlr Recipes" series, providing a collection of thoroughly explained code examples for specific crawling and scraping use-cases. This first article describes how you can crawl any website fully (all pages) and extract the data of schema.org structured data objects from all its pages, with just a few lines of code.

2023-02-08

I'm very proud to announce that version 1.0 of the crawler package is finally released. This article gives you an overview of why you should use this library for your web crawling and scraping jobs.

2022-10-03

Version 0.6 is probably the biggest update so far with a lot of new features and steps from crawling whole websites, over sitemaps to extracting metadata and schema.org structured data from HTML. Here is an overview of all the new stuff.

2022-09-03

We're already at v0.5 of the crawler package and this version comes with a lot of new features and improvements. Here's a quick overview of what's new.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.