This commit introduces the adaptive crawling feature to the crawl4ai project. The adaptive crawling feature intelligently determines when sufficient information has been gathered during a crawl, improving efficiency and reducing unnecessary resource usage.
The changes include the addition of new files related to the adaptive crawler, modifications to the existing files, and updates to the documentation. The new files include the main adaptive crawler script, utility functions, and various configuration and strategy scripts. The existing files that were modified include the project's initialization file and utility functions. The documentation has been updated to include detailed explanations and examples of the adaptive crawling feature.
The adaptive crawling feature will significantly enhance the capabilities of the crawl4ai project, providing users with a more efficient and intelligent web crawling tool.
Significant modifications:
- Added adaptive_crawler.py and related scripts
- Modified __init__.py and utils.py
- Updated documentation with details about the adaptive crawling feature
- Added tests for the new feature
BREAKING CHANGE: This is a significant feature addition that may affect the overall behavior of the crawl4ai project. Users are advised to review the updated documentation to understand how to use the new feature.
Refs: #123, #456
Add comprehensive virtual scroll handling to capture all content from pages that use DOM recycling techniques (Twitter, Instagram, etc).
Key features:
- New VirtualScrollConfig class for configuring virtual scroll behavior
- Automatic detection of three scrolling scenarios: no change, content appended, content replaced
- Intelligent HTML chunk capture and merging with deduplication
- 100% content capture from virtual scroll pages
- Seamless integration with existing extraction strategies
- JavaScript-based detection and capture for performance
- Tree-based DOM merging with text-based deduplication
Documentation:
- Comprehensive guide at docs/md_v2/advanced/virtual-scroll.md
- API reference updates in parameters.md and page-interaction.md
- Blog article explaining the solution and techniques
- Complete examples with local test server
Testing:
- Full test suite achieving 100% capture of 1000 items
- Examples for Twitter timeline, Instagram grid scenarios
- Local test server with different scrolling behaviors
This enables scraping of modern websites that were previously impossible to fully capture with traditional scrolling techniques.
Add support for controlling browser geolocation, locale and timezone settings:
- New GeolocationConfig class for managing GPS coordinates
- Add locale and timezone_id parameters to CrawlerRunConfig
- Update browser context creation to handle location settings
- Add example script for geolocation usage
- Update documentation with location-based identity features
This enables more precise control over browser identity and location reporting.
Implement comprehensive network request and console message capturing functionality:
- Add capture_network_requests and capture_console_messages config parameters
- Add network_requests and console_messages fields to models
- Implement Playwright event listeners to capture requests, responses, and console output
- Create detailed documentation and examples
- Add comprehensive tests
This feature enables deep visibility into web page activity for debugging,
security analysis, performance profiling, and API discovery in web applications.
Adds a new BrowserProfiler class that provides comprehensive management of browser profiles for identity-based crawling. Features include:
- Interactive profile creation and management
- Profile listing, retrieval, and deletion
- Guided console interface
- Migration of profile management from ManagedBrowser
- New example script for identity-based browsing
ALSO:
- Updates logging format in AsyncWebCrawler
- Removes content filter from hello_world example
- Relaxes httpx version constraint
BREAKING CHANGE: Profile management methods from ManagedBrowser are now deprecated and delegate to BrowserProfiler
- Restructure multi-URL crawling documentation with better formatting and examples
- Update code examples to use new API syntax (arun_many)
- Add detailed parameter explanations for RateLimiter and Dispatchers
- Enhance CSS styling for better documentation readability
- Fix outdated method calls in feature demo script
BREAKING CHANGE: Updated dispatcher.run_urls() to crawler.arun_many() in examples
Implements dynamic proxy rotation functionality with authentication support and IP verification. Updates include:
- Added proxy rotation demo in features example
- Updated proxy configuration handling in BrowserManager
- Added proxy rotation documentation
- Updated README with new proxy rotation feature
- Bumped version to 0.4.3b2
This change enables users to dynamically switch between proxies and verify IP addresses for each request.
Prepare the v0.4.3 beta release with major feature additions and improvements:
- Add JsonXPathExtractionStrategy and LLMContentFilter to exports
- Update version to 0.4.3b1
- Improve documentation for dispatchers and markdown generation
- Update development status to Beta
- Reorganize changelog format
BREAKING CHANGE: Memory threshold in MemoryAdaptiveDispatcher increased to 90% and SemaphoreDispatcher parameter renamed to max_session_permit
Add support for checking and respecting robots.txt rules before crawling websites:
- Implement RobotsParser class with SQLite caching
- Add check_robots_txt parameter to CrawlerRunConfig
- Integrate robots.txt checking in AsyncWebCrawler
- Update documentation with robots.txt compliance examples
- Add tests for robot parser functionality
The cache uses WAL mode for better concurrency and has a default TTL of 7 days.
Add proxy_config parameter to CrawlerRunConfig to support dynamic proxy configuration per crawl request. This enables users to specify different proxy settings for each crawl operation without modifying the browser config.
- Added proxy_config parameter to CrawlerRunConfig
- Updated BrowserManager to apply proxy settings from CrawlerRunConfig
- Updated proxy-security documentation with new usage examples
Add comprehensive documentation for the new streaming mode feature in arun_many():
- Update arun_many() API docs to reflect streaming return type
- Add streaming examples in quickstart and multi-url guides
- Document stream parameter in configuration classes
- Add clone() helper method documentation for configs
This change improves documentation for processing large numbers of URLs efficiently.
Reorganize dispatcher functionality into separate components:
- Create dedicated dispatcher classes (MemoryAdaptive, Semaphore)
- Add RateLimiter for smart request throttling
- Implement CrawlerMonitor for real-time progress tracking
- Move dispatcher config from CrawlerRunConfig to separate classes
BREAKING CHANGE: Dispatcher configuration moved from CrawlerRunConfig to dedicated dispatcher classes. Users need to update their configuration approach for multi-URL crawling.
Reorganize documentation into core/advanced/extraction sections for better navigation.
Update terminal theme styles and add rich library for better CLI output.
Remove redundant tutorial files and consolidate content into core sections.
Add personal story to index page for project context.
BREAKING CHANGE: Documentation structure has been significantly reorganized
Standardizes parameter naming convention across the codebase by renaming browser_config to the more concise config in AsyncWebCrawler constructor.
Updates all documentation examples and internal usages to reflect the new parameter name for consistency.
Also improves hook execution by adding url/response parameters to goto hooks and fixes parameter ordering in before_return_html hook.
- Fix crawler text mode for improved performance; cover missing `srcset` and `data_srcset` attributes in image tags.
- Introduced Managed Browsers for enhanced crawling experience.
- Updated documentation for clearer navigation on configuration.
- Changed 'text_only' to 'text_mode' in configuration and methods.
- Improved performance and relevance in content filtering strategies.
- Introduced the PruningContentFilter for better content relevance.
- Implemented comprehensive unit tests for verification of functionality.
- Enhanced existing BM25ContentFilter tests for edge case coverage.
- Updated documentation to include usage examples for new filter.
- Updated version to 0.3.743
- Improved ManagedBrowser configuration with dynamic host/port
- Implemented fast HTML formatting in web crawler
- Enhanced markdown generation with a new generator class
- Improved sanitization and utility functions
- Added contributor details and pull request acknowledgments
- Updated documentation for clearer usage scenarios
- Adjusted tests to reflect class name changes
Major changes:
- Add browser takeover feature using CDP for authentic browsing
- Implement Docker support with full API server documentation
- Enhance Mockdown with tag preservation system
- Improve parallel crawling performance
This release focuses on authenticity and scalability, introducing the ability
to use users' own browsers while providing containerized deployment options.
Breaking changes include modified browser handling and API response structure.
See CHANGELOG.md for detailed migration guide.
