zcrawl is an open source software platform to deploy and orchestrate web crawlers and crawling tasks in general. It's written in Go and one of the goals is to make it as flexible as possible to allow integrations with different languages and third-party services.
In order to avoid any language lock-ins, zcrawl will provide enough tools to enhance the process of creating and deploying a web crawler using your favorite language, so it's not Go specific.
We're still in the planning phase and the roadmap is subject to changes. A prototype is in progress and it's being developed as we want to test some of our ideas in a minimal way.
No instructions are provided at this time, if you're interested feel free to pull the code, build it and see what happens :)
The project is targeted to users who want an easy way of deploying web crawlers, without messing up with crontab (in case you need to schedule recurrent crawling jobs), plain CSV files (in case you do this straight from the command line), multi-worker environments (when you need to orchestrate a distributed crawling task) and more complex pipelines that might be a combination of all these tasks.
Think about this as a Heroku-like solution where you can deploy text crawlers and orchestrate them to re-train your machine learning models with fresh data, everything in your own infrastructure. This is the type of scenarios we're interested in.
TBA
hello AT zcrawl DOT org