rbdt

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rbdt is a work in progress, currently being extracted out of another (private) project for the purpose of open sourcing and better software engineering.

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rbdt is a python library (written in rust) for parsing robots.txt files for large scale batch processing.

rbdt features:

• MIT license, have fun.
• Written in Rust, so it is fast.
• Callable from Python, so it is useful.
• Has been and continues to be run against millions of unique robots.txt files.
• Forgiving, corrects some typical mistakes in files written by hand, like recognizing dissallows probably meant to be disallow.
• Intentionally provides direct access to the parsed robots.txt representation (unlike Reppy or Google's parser).
• Ability to compare which user agent has more privilege given to it by the website owner, both heuristically and logically.

rbdt anti-features:

• rbdt isn't meant to be used as part of a web crawler, but as part of a large scale analysis of robots.txt files. If ends up being useful for web crawlers eventually, that's great and only incidental.

Development

maturin develop
python py_tests/tests.py

Releases

rbdt uses github ci/cd to do releases to pypi. Tag the commit with the version and it will end up on pypi.

Contributions

File a ticket or send a PR if you'd like.

To Do

• Real Open Sourcing Hours
  • Changelog
  • Write documentation and put them somewhere
  • branch protection for main, no direct writes only PR's
  • automated tests
• Crawl-delay parsing and restructuring of the data representation.
• Be able to detect whether a crawler can access a specific page.
• More tests of all the various edge cases.
• Benchmarks, (maybe someday never).
• Publish it as a Rust library as well (maybe).
• Get Rust tests working (maybe).