README

Fink (pronounced "Phpink") is a command line tool, written in PHP, for checking HTTP links.

• Check websites for broken links or error pages.
• Asynchronous HTTP requests.

Installation

Install as a stand-alone tool or as a project dependency:

Installing as a project dependency

$ composer require dantleech/fink --dev

Installing from a PHAR

Download the PHAR from the Releases page.

Building your own PHAR with Box

You can build your own PHAR by cloning this repository and running:

$ ./vendor/bin/box compile

Usage

Run the command with a single URL to start crawling:

$ ./vendor/bin/fink https://www.example.com

Use --output=somefile to log verbose information for each URL in JSON format, including:

• url: The tested URL.
• status: The HTTP status code.
• referrer: The page which linked to the URL.
• referrer_title: The value (e.g. link title) of the referring element.
• referrer_xpath: The path to the node in the referring document.
• distance: The number of links away from the start document.
• request_time: Number of microseconds taken to make the request.
• timestamp: The time that the request was made.
• exception: Any runtime exception encountered (e.g. malformed URL, etc).

Arguments

• url (multiple) Specify one or more base URLs to crawl (mandatory).

Options

• --client-max-body-size: Max body size for HTTP client (in bytes).
• --client-max-header-size: Max header size for HTTP client (in bytes).
• --client-redirects=5: Set the maximum number of times the client should redirect (0 to never redirect).
• --client-security-level=1: Set the default SSL security level
• --client-timeout=15000: Set the maximum amount of time (in milliseconds) the client should wait for a response, defaults to 15,000 (15 seconds).
• --concurrency: Number of simultaneous HTTP requests to use.
• --display-bufsize=10: Set the number of URLs to consider when showing the display.
• --display=+memory: Set, add or remove elements of the runtime display (prefix with - or + to modify the default set).
• --exclude-url=logout: (multiple) Exclude URLs matching the given PCRE pattern.
• --header="Foo: Bar": (multiple) Specify custom header(s).
• --help: Display available options.
• --include-link=foobar.html: Include given link as if it were linked from the base URL.
• --insecure: Do not verify SSL certificates.
• --load-cookies: Load from a cookies.txt.
• --max-distance: Maximum allowed distance from base URL (if not specified then there is no limitation).
• --max-external-distance: Limit the external (disjoint) distance from the base URL.
• --no-dedupe: Do not filter duplicate URLs (can result in a non-terminating process).
• --output=out.json: Output JSON report for each URL to given file (truncates existing content).
• --publisher=csv: Set the publisher (defaults to json) can be either json or csv.
• --rate: Set a maximum number of requests to make in a second.
• --stdout: Stream to STDOUT directly, disables display and any specified outfile.

Examples

Crawl a single website

$ fink http://www.example.com --max-external-distance=0

Crawl a single website and check the status of external links

$ fink http://www.example.com --max-external-distance=1

Use jq to analyse results

jq is a tool which can be used to query and manipulate JSON data.

$ fink http://www.example.com -x0 -oreport.json

$ cat report.json| jq -c '. | select(.status==404) | {url: .url, referrer: .referrer}' | jq

Crawl pages behind a login

# create a cookies file for later re-use (simulate a login in this case via HTTP-POST)
$ curl -L --cookie-jar mycookies.txt -d username=myLogin -d password=MyP4ssw0rd https://www.example.org/my/login/url

# re-use the cookies file with your fink crawl command
$ fink https://www.example.org/myaccount --load-cookies=mycookies.txt

note: its not possible to create the cookie jar on computer A, store it and read it in again on e.g. a linux server. you need to create the cookie file from the very same ip, because otherwise server side session handling might not continue the http-session because of a IP mismatch

Exit Codes

• 0: All URLs were successful.
• 1: Unexpected runtime error.
• 2: At least one URL failed to resolve successfully.