cdx_toolkit is a set of tools for working with CDX indices of web crawls and archives, including those at the Common Crawl Foundation (CCF) and those at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Common Crawl uses Ilya Kreymer's pywb to serve the CDX API, which is somewhat different from the Internet Archive's CDX API server. cdx_toolkit hides these differences as best it can. cdx_toolkit also knits together the monthly Common Crawl CDX indices into a single, virtual index.
Finally, cdx_toolkit allows extracting archived pages from CC and IA into WARC files. If you're looking to create subsets of CC or IA data and then further process them, this is a feature you'll find useful.
$ pip install cdx_toolkit
or clone this repo and use pip install .
$ cdxt --cc size 'commoncrawl.org/*'
$ cdxt --cc --limit 10 iter 'commoncrawl.org/*' # returns the most recent year
$ cdxt --crawl 3 --limit 10 iter 'commoncrawl.org/*' # returns the most recent 3 crawls
$ cdxt --cc --limit 10 --filter '=status:200' iter 'commoncrawl.org/*'
$ cdxt --ia --limit 10 iter 'commoncrawl.org/*' # will show the beginning of IA's crawl
$ cdxt --ia --limit 10 warc 'commoncrawl.org/*'
cdxt takes a large number of command line switches, controlling the time period and all other CDX query options. cdxt can generate WARC, jsonl, and csv outputs.
If you don't specify much about the crawls or dates or number of
records you're interested in, some default limits will kick in to
prevent overly-large queries. These default limits include a maximum
of 1000 records (--limit 1000) and a limit of 1 year of CC indexes.
To exceed these limits, use --limit and --crawl or --from and
--to.
If it seems like nothing is happening, add -v or -vv at the start:
$ cdxt -vv --cc size 'commoncrawl.org/*'
Common Crawl's data is divided into "crawls", which were yearly at the start, and are currently done monthly. There are over 100 of them. You can find details about these crawls here.
Unlike some web archives, CCF doesn't have a single CDX index that covers all of these crawls -- we have 1 index per crawl. The way you ask for a particular crawl is:
$ cdxt --crawl CC-MAIN-2024-33 iter 'commoncrawl.org/*'
--crawl CC-MAIN-2024-33is a single crawl.--crawl 3is the latest 3 crawls.--crawl CC-MAIN-2018will match all of the crawls from 2018.--crawl CC-MAIN-2018,CC-MAIN-2019will match all of the crawls from 2018 and 2019.
CCF also has a hive-sharded parquet index (called the columnar index) that covers all of our crawls. Querying broad time ranges is much faster with the columnar index. You can find more information about this index at the blog post about it.
The Internet Archive cdx index is organized as a single crawl that goes
from the very beginning until now. That's why there is no --crawl for
--ia. Note that cdx queries to --ia will default to one year year
and limit 1000 entries if you do not specify --from, --to, and --limit.
In most cases you'll probably use --crawl to select the time range for Common Crawl queries, but for the Internet Archive you'll need to specify a time range like this:
$ cdxt --ia --limit 1 --from 2008 --to 200906302359 iter 'commoncrawl.org/*'
In this example the time range starts at the beginning of 2008 and
ends on June 30, 2009 at 23:59. All times are in UTC. If you do not
specify a time range (and also don't use --crawl), you'll get the
most recent year.
$ cdxt --help
$ cdxt iter --help
$ cdxt warc --help
$ cdxt size --help
for full details. Note that argument order really matters; each switch is valid only either before or after the {iter,warc,size} command.
Add -v (or -vv) to see what's going on under the hood.
Everything that you can do on the command line, and much more, can be done by writing a Python program.
import cdx_toolkit
cdx = cdx_toolkit.CDXFetcher(source='cc')
url = 'commoncrawl.org/*'
print(url, 'size estimate', cdx.get_size_estimate(url))
for obj in cdx.iter(url, limit=1):
print(obj)
at the moment will print:
commoncrawl.org/* size estimate 36000
{'urlkey': 'org,commoncrawl)/', 'timestamp': '20180219112308', 'mime-detected': 'text/html', 'url': 'http://commoncrawl.org/', 'status': '200', 'filename': 'crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-09/segments/1518891812584.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20180219111908-20180219131908-00494.warc.gz', 'mime': 'text/html', 'length': '5365', 'digest': 'FM7M2JDBADOQIHKCSFKVTAML4FL2HPHT', 'offset': '81614902'}
You can also fetch the content of the web capture as bytes:
print(obj.content)
There's a full example of iterating and selecting a subset of captures to write into an extracted WARC file in examples/iter-and-warc.py
Filters can be used to limit captures to a subset of the results.
Any field name listed in cdxt iter --all-fields can be used in a
filter. These field names are appropriately renamed if the source is
'ia'. The different syntax of filter modifiers for 'ia' and 'cc' is
not fully abstracted away by cdx_toolkit.
The basic syntax of a filter is [modifier]field:expression, for
example =status:200 or !=status:200.
'cc'-style filters (pywb) come in six flavors: substring match, exact string, full-match regex, and their inversions. These are indicated by a modifier of nothing, '=', '~', '!', '!=', and '!~', respectively.
'ia'-style filters (Wayback/OpenWayback) come in two flavors, a full-match regex and an inverted full-match regex: 'status:200' and '!status:200'
Multiple filters will be combined with AND. For example, to limit captures to those which do not have status 200 and do not have status 404,
$ cdxt --cc --filter '!=status:200' --filter '!=status:404' iter ...
Note that filters that discard large numbers of captures put a high load on the CDX server -- for example, a filter that returns just a few captures from a domain that has tens of millions of captures is likely to run very slowly and annoy the owner of the CDX server.
See https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb/wiki/CDX-Server-API#filter (pywb) and https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-server#filtering (wayback) for full details of filter modifiers.
cdx_toolkit supports all (ok, most!) of the options and fields discussed in the CDX API documentation:
- https://github.com/webrecorder/pywb/wiki/CDX-Server-API
- https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/tree/master/wayback-cdx-server
A capture is a single crawled url, be it a copy of a webpage, a redirect to another page, an error such as 404 (page not found), or a revisit record (page identical to a previous capture.)
The url used by cdx_tools can be wildcarded in two ways. One way
is *.example.com, which in CDX jargon sets matchType='domain',
and will return captures for example.com and blog.example.com and
support.example.com. The other, example.com/*, will return captures
for any page on example.com.
A timestamp represents year-month-day-time as a string of digits run togther. Example: January 5, 2016 at 12:34:56 UTC is 20160105123456. These timestamps are a field in the index, and are also used to pick specify the dates used by --from=, --to, and --closest on the command-line. (Programmatically, use from_ts=, to=, and closest=.)
An urlkey is a SURT, which is a munged-up url suitable for
deduplication and sorting. This sort order is how CDX indices
efficiently support queries like *.example.com. The SURTs for
www.example.com and example.com are identical, which is handy when
these 2 hosts actually have identical web content. The original url
should be present in all records, if you want to know exactly what it
is.
The limit argument limits how many captures will be returned. To help users not shoot themselves in the foot, a limit of 1,000 is applied to --get and .get() calls.
A filter allows a user to select a subset of CDX records, reducing network traffic between the CDX API server and the user. For example, filter='!status:200' will only show captures whose http status is not 200. Multiple filters can be specified as a list (in the api) and on the command line (by specifying --filter more than once). Filters and limit work together, with the limit applying to the count of captures after the filter is applied. Note that revisit records have a status of '-', not 200.
CDX API servers support a paged interface for efficient access to large sets of URLs. cdx_toolkit iterators always use the paged interface. cdx_toolkit is also polite to CDX servers by being single-threaded and serial. If it's not fast enough for you, consider downloading Common Crawl's index files directly.
A digest is a sha1 checksum of the contents of a capture. The purpose of a digest is to be able to easily figure out if 2 captures have identical content.
Common Crawl publishes a new index each month. cdx_toolkit will start using new ones as soon as they are published. By default, cdx_toolkit will use the most recent 12 months of Common Crawl; you can change that using --from or from_ts= and --to or to=.
CDX implementations do not efficiently support reversed sort orders, so cdx_toolkit results will be ordered by ascending SURT and by ascending timestamp. However, since CC has an individual index for each month, and because most users want more recent results, cdx_toolkit defaults to querying CC's CDX indices in decreasing month order, but each month's result will be in ascending SURT and ascending timestamp. This default sort order is named 'mixed'. If you'd like pure ascending, set --cc-sort or cc_sort= to 'ascending'. You may want to also specify --from or from_ts= to set a starting timestamp.
The main problem with this ascending sort order is that it's a pain to get the most recent N captures: --limit and limit= will return the oldest N captures. With the 'mixed' ordering, a large enough limit= will get close to returning the most recent N captures.
Content downloading needs help with charset issues, preferably figuring out the charset using an algorithm similar to browsers.
WARC generation should do smart(er) things with revisit records.
Right now the CC code selects which monthly CC indices to use based solely on date ranges. It would be nice to have an alternative so that a client could iterate against the most recent N CC indices, and also have the default one-year lookback use an entire monthly index instead of a partial one.
cdx_toolkit has reached the beta-testing stage of development.
Copyright 2018-2020 Greg Lindahl and others
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this software 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.