This vulnerability impacts Log4J version 2.x, version 1.2 is not affected (source). Norconex HTTP Collector version 2.x use Log4J v1.2.17 and thus are not affected. Version 3 of the Collector uses Log4J v2.17.1, which Apache has patched.
Note: Unless you made it so on purpose, the HTTP Collector does not run as a service accessible from the internet.
Norconex is proud to announce the next major release of its popular open-source web crawler (also referred to as “Norconex HTTP Collector”). After a couple of years of development, you will find this new version was well worth the wait.
Not only does it introduce many new features, but it is also more flexible with even more documentation. Many of these improvements come from community feedback so long-term users deserve a pat on the back. This release is also yours.
If you are too eager to get started, you can download it now and follow its website documentation. Otherwise, keep reading for a glance at the new features.
Introduced features are too many to list here, but we’ll highlight some of the most significant.
Thanks to browser automation provided by Selenium WebDrivers, you can now use your favorite browser to crawl web pages relying on JavaScript to fully render. Generally speaking, if your browser can render content, the crawler can fetch it. It provides you with the ability to take screenshots of pages you crawl as well.
Committers are used to store crawled information into a target location, or repository of your choice. This version allows you to specify any number of committers to have your data sent to multiple targets at once (database, search engine, filesystem, etc.). It is also possible to perform simple routing as well.
Variables in configuration files can now be resolved against system properties and environment variables. Logging has been abstracted using SLF4J and now prints to STDOUT by default. These changes facilitate deployment in containerized environments (e.g., Docker).
The event management has been redesigned and simplified. There are now more than 60 different event types being triggered for programmers to listen to and act upon. Ranging from new Committer and Importer events, as well as expected Web Crawler events.
Similar XML configuration options are now specified in a consistent way. In addition, it is now possible to provide partial class names (e.g., class=“ExtensionReferenceFilter“ instead of class=“com.norconex.collector.core.filter.impl.ExtensionReferenceFilter“). The Importer module also allows you to use XML “flow” to facilitate configuration logic. That is, you can now make use of special XML tags: <if>, <ifNot>, <condition>, <conditions>, <else>, and <then>.
Documentation has been improved as well:
The JavaDoc now has formatted XML documentation and XML usage, which is easy to copy and paste into your own configuration.
A very simple yet useful configuration generator is now available online. It will help you create your first configuration file. You provide your “start” URL, answer a few questions and your configuration file will be generated for you.
Some additional features:
We recommend you have a look at the release notes for more.
If you are coming from Norconex HTTP Collector version 2, we recommend you have a look at the version 3 migration notes.
As always, community support is still available on GitHub. While on GitHub, take a moment to “Star” the project.
Come back once in a while as we’ll publish more in-depth articles on specific features or use cases you did not even think was possible to address with our web crawler.
Finally, we always love to know who is using the Norconex Web Crawler. Let us know and you may get listed on our wall of fame.
Enjoy!
In my previous article, I talked about the new Config Starter and its features. This article serves as a follow-up. Now that you know how to generate a crawler configuration file, I will highlight the steps you can undertake to get you started on your own website crawling activities.
We will be using the TOKYO 2020 Olympic Games’ website as the crawl site in this article. The steps are as follows:
*Note that it is not mandatory to use the Config Starter to generate your configuration file as it only makes a basic configuration file. If you are looking for a more complete solution, you can make your own configuration file with the documentation here.
Windows: collector-http.bat start -config= -config=/path/to/config.xml
Linux: collector-http.sh start -config= -config=/path/to/config.xml
Congratulations! You are now running your crawler. If all went according to plan, you should see something similar to the next image and the data crawled should now be located in the created committer directory (if you are using the same committer as me, it should be in the “work” folder).
Now that you have crawled the Olympic site, go and collect your gold medal!
If you encounter any issues during the process, you can find resolutions on the HTTP Collector GitHub issues page.
[Try] out the new Norconex HTTP Collector Config Starter.
[Download] and [get started] with the Norconex HTTP Collector.
[Learn] more about the inner workings of the Norconex HTTP Collector.
This year I was given the privilege to attend my first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtually. This event spans four days consisting of virtual activities such as visiting vendor booths, learning about Cloud Native projects, and exploring the advancement of cloud native computing.
The keynote started off by paying respects to the passing of the legendary Dan Kohn. Kohn’s influence has changed how we do online shopping to research on the internet and made ways for the new evolutions of The Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation for an exciting future for many generations to come, while supporting the creation of sustainable open source ecosystems.
There were glitches while live streaming from the virtual conference platform, which was to be expected due to the real-time heavy load test that is not desirable in any production environments. Fortunately, on-demand recordings of the presentations are now available.
Slack channels can be joined from cloud-native.slack.com to communicate with others from channels like #kubecon-mixandmingle and other KubeCon-related topics. This feature provides a great way to connect with the KubeCon audience virtually even after the event is over.
KubeCon provides many 101 learning and tutorial events about the service CNCF projects offer and how it can help with the 3 main pillars that I am involved with daily: automation, dev-ops, and observability. Each of the pillar implementations are usually done in parallel, for instance, continuous development and continuous deployment required automation in building the pipeline, involves creating codes and having knowledge in operations architecture planning. Once deployed, the observability of the services running would be required to monitor for smooth services deliver to users. Many of the projects from the CNCF provide the services front to help create the development flow from committing code that gets deployed into the cloud services and providing monitoring capabilities to the secured mesh services.
At Norconex, our upcoming Norconex Collector version 3.0.0 could be used with the combination of Containerd, Helm, and Kubernetes and with automating the build and deployment via Jenkins. One way to get started is to figure out how to package the Norconex Collector and Norconex Committer into a container-runnable image with container tools such as Docker to run builds for development and testing. After discerning how to build the container image, I have to decide where to deploy and store the container image registry so that the Kubernetes cluster can pull the image from this registry and run the container image with Kubernetes Cronjob based on a schedule when the job should run. The Kubernetes Job would create Pod to run crawl using the Norconex Collector and commit indexed data. Finally, I would choose Jenkins as the build tool for this experiment to help to automate updates and deployments.
Below are steps that provide an overview for my quick demo experiment setup:
I hope you enjoyed this recap of Kubecon!
More details of the codes and tutorials can be found here:
https://github.com/somphouang/norconex-devops-demo
Norconex is proud to announce the 2.9.0 release of its HTTP and Filesystem crawlers. Keep reading for a few release highlights.
Norconex Filesystem Collector now supports Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). CMIS is an open standard for accessing content management systems (CMS) content. Extra information can be extracted, such as document ACL (Access Control List) for document-level security. It is now easier than ever to crawl your favorite CMS. CMIS is supported by Alfresco, Interwoven, Magnolia, SharePoint server, OpenCMS, OpenText Documentum, and more.
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<startPaths> <path>cmis-atom:https://norconex.com/mycms/cmisatom!/my/starting/path</path> </startPaths> |
ACL from your CMS is not the only new type of ACL you can extract. This new Norconex Filesystem Collector release introduces support for obtaining local filesystem ACL. These new ACL types are in addition to the already existing support for CIFS/SMB ACL extraction (since 2.7.0).
You can’t always tell upfront what metadata your crawler will find. One way to discover your fields is to send them all to your Committer. This approach is not always possible nor desirable. You can now store to a local file all fields found by the crawler. Each field will be saved once, with sample values to give you a better idea of their nature.
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<tagger class="com.norconex.importer.handler.tagger.impl.FieldReportTagger" maxSamples="2" file="/path/to/report/myfields.csv" /> |
The HTTP Collector adds a few new rules GenericURLNormalizer. Those are:
When you configure your HTTP crawler to stay on the current site (stayOnDomain="true"), you can now tell it to consider sub-domains as being the same site (includeSubdomains="true").
For a complete list of all additions and changes, refer to the following release notes:
Kafka users rejoice! You can now use Norconex open-source crawlers with Apache Kafka, thanks to the Norconex Apache Kafka Committer.
We owe this contribution to Joseph Paulo Mantuano (Senior Developer at The Red Flag Group) and Dan Davis.
The Norconex Collectors community keeps growing. We are thrilled to see the number of integrations grow with it as well. If you know of any Norconex Committer implementation out there, let us know and we’ll add them to the list!
Not yet familiar with Norconex crawlers? Head over to Norconex HTTP Collector or Norconex Filesystem Collector websites to learn more.
Great news! There is now a Google Cloud Search Committer for Norconex Crawlers!
This addition to Norconex Collector family should delight Google Cloud Search fans. They too can now enjoy the full-featured crawling capabilities offered by Norconex Open-Source crawlers.
Since this Committer is developed and maintained by Google, you will find installation and configuration documentation on the Google Developers website.
New to Norconex crawlers? Head over to the Norconex Collectors website to start crawling.
Happy crawling!
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Canadian Public Sector organized another excellent Public Sector Summit on May 15, 2019. AWS hosted the first such summit in Ottawa last year, but this year’s event attracted a much larger crowd. Thousands of attendees filled Shaw Centre’s entire third floor.
In the keynote sessions, it was great to hear Alex Benay (deputy minister at the Treasury Board of Canada) talk about the government’s modern digital initiative. He discussed the approach, successes, and challenges of the government’s Cloud migration journey. Another excellent speaker was Mohamed Frendi (director of IT, innovation, science, and economic development for the government of Canada). He covered Canada’s API Store and how it uses the Cloud to make government data more accessible.
The afternoon session was led by Darin Briskman, an AWS developer evangelist. He talked about Amazon’s self-service analytics tool, called AWS Lake Formation, which combines data from multiple sources to resolve data-driven challenges in a timely manner. Machine learning and AI help in making informed decisions and solving problems. This service is a great fit for Norconex’s open-source crawler products HTTP Collector and Filesystem Collector, which fetch data from unstructured data sources to make it easy to consume. Collected content and metadata are natively stored in various existing repositories (or formats), including AWS-specific ones like Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Open Distro Elasticsearch, and Amazon CloudSearch, as well as many others, such as relational databases, Apache Solr, Google Cloud Search, Neo4J, Microsoft Azure Search, Lucidworks, IDOL, and more.
The diagrams below provide further explanation. The one showing the crawling spider is particularly exciting, because Norconex crawlers have much potential to help in this area. See available Norconex Committers.
AWS Public Sector Summit Event Pass
Selfies with Darin Briskman, Developer Evangelist, AWS and Stevan Beara, Solutions Architect Manager, AWS.
Norconex crawlers and Neo4j graph database are now a love match! Neo4j is arguably the most popular graph database out there. Use Norconex crawlers to harvest relationships from websites and filesystems and feed them to your favorite graph engine.
This was made possible thanks to no other than France contributor Sylvain Roussy, a Neo4j reference, and author of 2 Neo4j books. Norconex is proud to have been able to partner with Sylvain to develop a Neo4j Committer for use with its Norconex HTTP and Filesystem Collectors.
To our French-speaking European friends, Sylvain will host a series of Neo4j Meetups at different locations. He will explain how Norconex crawlers can be used to gather graph data from the web to use in Neo4j. The first of the series is taking place on January 24th, in Genève:
Useful Links:
Docker is popular because it makes it easy to package and deliver programs. This article will show you how to run the Java-based, open-source crawler, Norconex HTTP Collector and Elasticsearch Committer in Docker to crawl a website and index its content into Elasticsearch. At the end of this article, you can find links to download the complete, fully functional files.
Here is the whole structure, which contains a “Dockerfile” to make a Docker image, “entrypoint.sh” and “start.sh” in “bin/” directory to configure and execute the Docker container, and “es-config.xml” in “examples/elasticsearch” as Norconex-Collector’s configuration file to crawl a website and index contents into Elasticsearch.
We are using Docker Community Edition in this tutorial. See Install Docker for more information.
Download the latest Norconex Collector and extract the downloaded .zip file. See Getting Started for more details.
Download the latest Norconex Elasticsearch Committer and install it. See Installation for more details.
Create “es-config.xml” in the “examples/elasticsearch” directory. In this tutorial, we will crawl /product/collector-http-test/complex1.php and /product/collector-http-test/complex2.php and index them to Elasticsearch, which is running on 127.0.0.1:9200, with an index named “norconex.” See Norconex Collector Configuration as a reference.
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- Copyright 2010-2017 Norconex Inc. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. --> <httpcollector id="Norconex Complex Collector"> #set($http = "com.norconex.collector.http") #set($core = "com.norconex.collector.core") #set($urlNormalizer = "${http}.url.impl.GenericURLNormalizer") #set($filterExtension = "${core}.filter.impl.ExtensionReferenceFilter") #set($filterRegexRef = "${core}.filter.impl.RegexReferenceFilter") #set($committerClass = "com.norconex.committer.elasticsearch.ElasticsearchCommitter") #set($searchUrl = "http://127.0.0.1:9200") <progressDir>../crawlers/norconex/progress</progressDir> <logsDir>../crawlers/norconex/logs</logsDir> <crawlerDefaults> <referenceFilters> <filter class="$filterExtension" onMatch="exclude">jpg,gif,png,ico,css,js</filter> </referenceFilters> <urlNormalizer class="$urlNormalizer"> <normalizations> removeFragment, lowerCaseSchemeHost, upperCaseEscapeSequence, decodeUnreservedCharacters, removeDefaultPort, encodeNonURICharacters, removeDotSegments </normalizations> </urlNormalizer> <maxDepth>0</maxDepth> <workDir>../crawlers/norconex/workDir</workDir> <!-- We know we don't want to crawl the entire site, so ignore sitemap. --> <sitemapResolverFactory ignore="true" /> </crawlerDefaults> <crawlers> <crawler id="Norconex Complex Test Page 1"> <startURLs> <url>/product/collector-http-test/complex1.php</url> </startURLs> <committer class="$committerClass"> <nodes>$searchUrl</nodes> <indexName>norconex</indexName> <typeName>web</typeName> <queueDir>../crawlers/norconex/committer-queue</queueDir> <targetContentField>body</targetContentField> <queueSize>100</queueSize> <commitBatchSize>500</commitBatchSize> </committer> </crawler> <crawler id="Norconex Complex Test Page 2"> <startURLs> <url>/product/collector-http-test/complex2.php</url> </startURLs> <committer class="$committerClass"> <nodes>$searchUrl</nodes> <indexName>norconex</indexName> <typeName>web</typeName> <queueDir>../crawlers/norconex/committer-queue</queueDir> <targetContentField>body</targetContentField> <queueSize>100</queueSize> <commitBatchSize>500</commitBatchSize> </committer> </crawler> </crawlers> </httpcollector> |
Create a directory, “docker”, to store the configuration and execute scripts.
Entrypoint.sh:
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#!/bin/sh set -x set -e set -- /docker/crawler/docker/start.sh "$@" exec "$@" |
start.sh:
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#!/bin/sh set -x set -e ${CRAWLER_HOME}/collector-http.sh -a start -c examples/elasticsearch/es-config.xml |
A Dockerfile is a simple text -file that contains a list of commands that the Docker client calls on while creating an image. Create a new file, “Dockerfile”, in the “norconex-collector-http-2.8.0” directory.
Let’s start with the base image “java:8-jdk” using FROM keyword.
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FROM java:8-jdk |
Set environment variables and create a user and group in the image. We’ll set DOCKER_HOME and CRAWLER_HOME environment variables and create the user and group, “crawler”.
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ENV DOCKER_HOME /docker ENV CRAWLER_HOME /docker/crawler RUN groupadd crawler && useradd -g crawler crawler |
The following commands will create DOCKER_HOME and CRAWLER_HOME directories in the container and copy the content from the “norconex-collector-http-2.8.0” directory into CRAWLER_HOME.
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RUN mkdir -p ${DOCKER_HOME} RUN mkdir -p ${CRAWLER_HOME} COPY ./ ${CRAWLER_HOME} |
The following commands change ownership and permissions for DOCKER_HOME, set entrypoint, and execute the crawler.
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RUN chown -R crawler:crawler ${DOCKER_HOME} && chmod -R 755 ${DOCKER_HOME} ENTRYPOINT [ "/docker/crawler/docker/entrypoint.sh" ] CMD [ "/docker/crawler/docker/start.sh" ] |
Build a Docker image of Norconex Collector with the following command:
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$ docker build -t norconex-collector:2.8.0 . |
You will see this success message:
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Successfully built 43298c7de13f Successfully tagged norconex-collector:2.8.0 |
Start Elasticsearch for development with the following command (see Install Elasticsearch with Docker for more details):
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$ docker run -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:6.1.2 |
Start Norconex Collector.
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$ docker run --net=host norconex-collector:2.8.0 |
Let’s verify the crawling result. Visit http://127.0.0.1:9200/norconex/_search?pretty=true&q=* and you will see two indexed documents.
This tutorial is for development or testing use. If you would like to use it in a production environment, then we recommend that you consider the data persistence of Elasticsearch Docker container, security, and so forth, based on your particular case.
Download Norconex Collector
Download Norconex Elasticsearch Committer