#Introduction
ConventionCrawler is a tool for crawling a convention-over-configuration application and extracting knowledge about its structure.
In its current iteration, it generates valid endpoints for Model-View-Controller applications.
It can be used as a command line util to generate a file containing the list of fully qualified Controller class names along with their public actions, or added as a package to another Python app to generate that data as a List of Strings.
#Usage
As a command-line app, ConventionCrawler should be run from within the base of the app it is to crawl.
ConventionCrawler requires one arguments: the convention of your app (e.g., grails or retroBrowser).
Some conventions, such as the retroBrowser convention, require the application name as a named argument.
Sample Usage:
conventionCrawler grails
conventionCrawler retroBrowser --app_name tictactoe
conventionCrawler retroBrowser -a tictactoe
#Installation
This is a Python 3 application and requires version 3.2 or greater.
This package can be installed with pip, which comes along with Python 3.4 and above. If downloading from this repository, you will need to run setup.py.
From within the downloaded repository, run:
python3 setup.py install
#Example Usage
###Web-app Security
RetroBrowser will use ConventionCrawler as a mechanism to build a whitelist for validating URL endpoints.
#Set of Supported Frameworks
- RetroBrowser
- Grails
- Grails 2 and 3 are supported
To add to the set of supported frameworks, just add a new Convention File
ConventionCrawler has no default framework that it uses. The conventionCrawler command-line utility expects an argument telling it what convention to use.
Usage
conventionCrawler <convention>
Sample Usage:
conventionCrawler grails
The value for the <convention> parameter should be the first part of the convention file name:
| Framework | flag value | convention file name |
|---|---|---|
| RetroBrowser | retroBrowser | retroBrowser.convention |
| Grails | grails | grails.convention |
Convention Files are named <framework>.convention and live in the conventions directory at the base
of this project. Convention filenames are the lowerCamelCase form of the framework they describe. See the table in
Identifying your framework for examples.
As example, the RetroBrowser convention file,
retroBrowser.convention, is shown here, with comments:
// variable names are in angle brackets, < >
// variable names are valid python variable names
// variables are placeholders. They are keywords. Variable names are not freely chosen.
language {
python
}
structure {
app_dir: <app_name>
controllers_dir: controllers
}
controller {
<controller_name>Controller.py
}
// All the keywords are valid python variable names
endpoint {
controller_style: upper_camel_case
endpoint_style: lower_camel_case
endpoint: <controller_name>/<action_name>
}
// Possible cases are:
// upper_camel_case
// lower_camel_case
// snake_case
Note: The Convention Grammar does not support trailing whitespace at the end of the convention file.