## Introducing Event Streams and Interactive Hooks in Crawl4AI

![event-driven-crawl](https://res.cloudinary.com/kidocode/image/upload/t_400x400/v1734344008/15bb8bbb-83ac-43ac-962d-3feb3e0c3bbf_2_tjmr4n.webp)

In the near future, I’m planning to enhance Crawl4AI’s capabilities by introducing an event stream mechanism that will give clients deeper, real-time insights into the crawling process. Today, hooks are a powerful feature at the code level—they let developers define custom logic at key points in the crawl. However, when using Crawl4AI as a service (e.g., through a Dockerized API), there isn’t an easy way to interact with these hooks at runtime.

**What’s Changing?**

I’m working on a solution that will allow the crawler to emit a continuous stream of events, updating clients on the current crawling stage, encountered pages, and any decision points. This event stream could be exposed over a standardized protocol like Server-Sent Events (SSE) or WebSockets, enabling clients to “subscribe” and listen as the crawler works.

**Interactivity Through Process IDs**

A key part of this new design is the concept of a unique process ID for each crawl session. Imagine you’re listening to an event stream that informs you:
- The crawler just hit a certain page  
- It triggered a hook and is now pausing for instructions  

With the event stream in place, you can send a follow-up request back to the server—referencing the unique process ID—to provide extra data, instructions, or parameters. This might include selecting which links to follow next, adjusting extraction strategies, or providing authentication tokens for a protected API. Once the crawler receives these instructions, it resumes execution with the updated context.

```mermaid
sequenceDiagram
    participant Client
    participant Server
    participant Crawler

    Client->>Server: Start crawl request
    Server->>Crawler: Initiate crawl with Process ID
    Crawler-->>Server: Event: Page hit
    Server-->>Client: Stream: Page hit event
    Client->>Server: Instruction for Process ID
    Server->>Crawler: Update crawl with new instructions
    Crawler-->>Server: Event: Crawl completed
    Server-->>Client: Stream: Crawl completed
```

**Benefits for Developers and Users**

1. **Fine-Grained Control**: Instead of predefining all logic upfront, you can dynamically guide the crawler in response to actual data and conditions encountered mid-crawl.
2. **Real-Time Insights**: Monitor progress, errors, or network bottlenecks as they happen, without waiting for the entire crawl to finish.
3. **Enhanced Collaboration**: Different team members or automated systems can watch the same crawl events and provide input, making the crawling process more adaptive and intelligent.

**Next Steps**

I’m currently exploring the best APIs, technologies, and patterns to make this vision a reality. My goal is to deliver a seamless developer experience—one that integrates with existing Crawl4AI workflows while offering new flexibility and power.

Stay tuned for more updates as I continue building this feature out. In the meantime, I’d love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have to help shape this interactive, event-driven future of web crawling with Crawl4AI.

