This is the repository hosting the public DocSearch configurations.
The configuration files can be found here https://github.com/algolia/docsearch-configs
A configuration file should look like:
{
"index_name": "stripe",
"start_urls": [
"https://stripe.com/docs"
],
"stop_urls": [
"https://stripe.com/docs/api"
],
"selectors_exclude": [
".method-list",
"aside.note"
],
"selectors": {
"lvl0": "#content header h1",
"lvl1": "#content article h1",
"lvl2": "#content section h3",
"lvl3": "#content section h4",
"lvl4": "#content section h5",
"lvl5": "#content section h6",
"text": "#content header p,#content section p,#content section ol"
}
}
Mandatory
Name of the Algolia index where all the data will be pushed. If the PREFIX
environment variable is defined, it will be prefixed
with it.
Mandatory
You can pass either a string or an array of urls. The crawler will go to each
page in order, following every link it finds on the page. It will only stop if
the domain is outside of the allowed_domains
or if the link is blacklisted in
stop_urls
.
Strings will be considered as regex.
Note that it currently does not follow 301 redirects.
Mandatory
This object contains all the CSS selectors that will be used to create the
record hierarchy. It contains 6 levels (lvl0
, lvl1
, lvl2
, lvl3
, lvl4
,
lvl5
) and text
. You should fill at least the three first levels for better
relevance.
A default config would be to target the page title
or h1
as lvl0
, the h2
as lvl1
and h3
as lvl2
. text
is usually any p
of text.
It's possible to make a selector global which mean that all records for the page will have this value. This is useful when you have a title that in right sidebar because the sidebar is after the content on dom.
"selectors": {
"lvl0": {
"selector": "#content header h1",
"global": true
}
}
By default selector are considered css selectors but you can specify that a selector is an xpath one. This is useful when you want to do more complex selection like selecting the parent of a node.
"selectors": {
"lvl0": {
"selector": "//li[@class=\"chapter active done\"]/../../a",
"type": "xpath"
}
}
You have the possibility to add a default value. If the given selector doesn't match anything in a page then for each record the default value will be set
"selectors": {
"lvl0": {
"selector": "#content article h1",
"default_value": "Documentation"
}
}
You can override the default strip_chars
per level
"selectors": {
"lvl0": {
"selector": "#content article h1",
"strip_chars": " .,;:"
}
}
You can pass either a string or an array of strings. This is the whitelist of domains the crawler will scan. If a link targets a page that is not in the whitelist, the crawler will not follow it.
Default is the domain of the first element in the start_urls
This is the blacklist of urls on which the crawler should stop. If a link in
a crawled webpage targets one the elements in the stop_urls
list, the crawler
will not follow the link.
Note that you can use regexps as well as plain urls.
Note: It is sometimes needed to add http://www.example.com/index.html
pages to
the stop_urls
list if you set http://www.example.com
as a start_urls
, to
avoid duplicated content.
By default, the selectors
search is applied page-wide. If there are some parts
of the page that you do not want to include (like a header, sidebar or footer),
you can add them to the selectors_exclude
key.
This object is any custom Algolia settings you would like to pass to the index settings.
Lets you define the minimum level at which you want records to be indexed. For
example, with a min_indexed_level: 1
, you will only index records that have at
least a lvl1
field.
This is especially useful when the documentation is split into several pages, but all pages duplicates the main title (see this issue).
The HTML code that we crawl is sometimes generated using Javascript. In those
cases, the js_render
option must be set to true
. It will enable our
internal proxy (Selenium) to render pages before crawling them.
This parameter is optional and is set to false
by default.
The js_wait
parameter lets you change the default waiting time to render the
webpage with the Selenium proxy.
This parameter is optional and is set to 0
s by default.
The use_anchors
is need to be set to True for javascript doc when the hash is
used to route the query. Internally this will disable the canonicalize feature that
is removing the hash from the url.
This parameter is optional and is set to False by default.
A list of character to remove from the text that is indexed.
Default is ": " .,;:§¶"
Default if false
Default if false
Default if false
The number of object that should be indexed. Only used by the checker
.
Default is 0
.
The generator allows to both generate the selectors and visualize on pages
what is actually selected. Refer to html/generator/README.md
to use it.
To test it live, you can use the following HTML page:
# edit your credentials + index name in ./html/playground.html
$ open ./html/playground.html
$ ./bootstrap-config
After pushing the configuration to the configuration repository you still have
to deploy the scraper using the deploy script of this repository.
For more on how to use the script: html/deploy/README.md
.
You can build a development version of the image, to be used in development. It
will build the exact same image than the prod one but will expect the
/root/src
folder to be mapped to a volume on the host. This lets you edit the
python files in your favorite editor in the host while still being able to run
the script in a Docker environment.
First, build the development image:
docker build -t algolia/documentation-scraper-dev -f Dockerfile.dev .
Then, use a script to remove any dev container and rebuild it.
$ docker stop docname
$ docker rm docname
$ docker run \
-e APPLICATION_ID=appId \
-e API_KEY=apiKey \
-e INDEX_PREFIX=prefix_ \
-e CONFIG="$(cat configs/docname.json)" \
-v `pwd`/src:/root/src \
--name docname \
-t algolia/documentation-scraper-dev \
/root/run
And use this one to run the tests:
$ docker stop docname
$ docker rm docname
$ docker run \
-e APPLICATION_ID=appId \
-e API_KEY=apiKey \
-e INDEX_PREFIX=prefix_ \
-e CONFIG="$(cat configs/docname.json)" \
-v `pwd`/src:/root/src \
--name docname \
-t algolia/documentation-scraper-dev \
/root/test
In production, you build the image from the default Docker file, then run the container.
Several documentations are using Javascript to generate the HTML code. To
handle those documentations, this image which embeds our Selenium proxy in
order to render webpages before crawling them. Note that your JSON
configuration file must set the js_render
parameter to true
see js_render
. If not, the Selenium instance won't be started.
$ docker build -t algolia/documentation-scraper .
$ docker run \
-e APPLICATION_ID=appId \
-e API_KEY=apiKey \
-e INDEX_PREFIX=prefix_ \
-e CONFIG="$(cat configs/docname.json)" \
--name docname \
-t algolia/documentation-scraper
The checker, in checker
directory, is an automatic tool to check that the crawling infra behind DocSearch is running and that configurations do not have issues.
The deployer, in deployer
directory, is an automatic tool to deploy new configuration in the crawling infra of Algolia
It could happen that the crawled website returned duplicated data.
Most of the time, this is because the crawled website, got the same url with two different scheme.
If there is http://website.com/page
and http://website.com/page/
, notice the second one, the url is ended by /
, and for the scrapper, this is two different urls.
In most of the cases, you'll only have to add a regex to the stop_urls
in the config.json
:
$ "stop_urls": [
"/$"
]
But sometimes, the website's url you want to scrap are all ending with /
, so just specify which url you want to get rid of, like this :
$ "stop_urls": [
"http://website.com/page/"
]
And that way, only the first one will be taken in consideration.
Be careful to remove any hashsigns from the urls if it contains some
Bad :
$ "stop_urls": [
"http://website.com/page/#foo"
]
Good :
$ "stop_urls": [
"/$"
]
Or :
$ "stop_urls": [
"http://website.com/page/"
]