pferd/CONFIG.md

Config file format

A config file consists of sections. A section begins with a [section] header, which is followed by a list of key = value pairs. Comments must be on their own line and start with #. Multiline values must be indented beyond their key. Boolean values can be yes or no. For more details and some examples on the format, see the configparser documentation (basic interpolation is enabled).

The DEFAULT section

This section contains global configuration values. It can also be used to set default values for the other sections.

• working_dir: The directory PFERD operates in. Set to an absolute path to make PFERD operate the same regardless of where it is executed from. All other paths in the config file are interpreted relative to this path. If this path is relative, it is interpreted relative to the script's working dir. ~ is expanded to the current user's home directory. (Default: .)
• explain: Whether PFERD should log and explain its actions and decisions in detail. (Default: no)
• status: Whether PFERD should print status updates (like Crawled ..., Added ...) while running a crawler. (Default: yes)
• report: Whether PFERD should print a report of added, changed and deleted local files for all crawlers before exiting. (Default: yes)
• share_cookies: Whether crawlers should share cookies where applicable. For example, some crawlers share cookies if they crawl the same website using the same account. (Default: yes)

The crawl:* sections

Sections whose names start with crawl: are used to configure crawlers. The rest of the section name specifies the name of the crawler.

A crawler synchronizes a remote resource to a local directory. There are different types of crawlers for different kinds of resources, e. g. ILIAS courses or lecture websites.

Each crawl section represents an instance of a specific type of crawler. The type option is used to specify the crawler type. The crawler's name is usually used as the output directory. New crawlers can be created simply by adding a new crawl section to the config file.

Depending on a crawler's type, it may have different options. For more details, see the type's documentation below. The following options are common to all crawlers:

• type: The available types are specified in this section.
• output_dir: The directory the crawler synchronizes files to. A crawler will never place any files outside of this directory. (Default: the crawler's name)
• redownload: When to download a file that is already present locally. (Default: never-smart)
  • never: If a file is present locally, it is not downloaded again.
  • never-smart: Like never, but PFERD tries to detect if an already downloaded files has changed via some (unreliable) heuristics.
  • always: All files are always downloaded, regardless of whether they are already present locally.
  • always-smart: Like always, but PFERD tries to avoid unnecessary downloads via some (unreliable) heuristics.
• on_conflict: What to do when the local and remote versions of a file or directory differ, including when a file is replaced by a directory or a directory by a file. (Default: prompt)
  • prompt: Always ask the user before overwriting or deleting local files and directories.
  • local-first: Always keep the local file or directory. Equivalent to using prompt and always choosing "no". Implies that redownload is set to never.
  • remote-first: Always keep the remote file or directory. Equivalent to using prompt and always choosing "yes".
  • no-delete: Never delete local files, but overwrite local files if the remote file is different.
• transform: Rules for renaming and excluding certain files and directories. For more details, see this section. (Default: empty)
• tasks: The maximum number of concurrent tasks (such as crawling or downloading). (Default: 1)
• downloads: How many of those tasks can be download tasks at the same time. Must not be greater than tasks. (Default: Same as tasks)
• task_delay: Time (in seconds) that the crawler should wait between subsequent tasks. Can be used as a sort of rate limit to avoid unnecessary load for the crawl target. (Default: 0.0)
• windows_paths: Whether PFERD should find alternative names for paths that are invalid on Windows. (Default: yes on Windows, no otherwise)

Some crawlers may also require credentials for authentication. To configure how the crawler obtains its credentials, the auth option is used. It is set to the full name of an auth section (including the auth: prefix).

Here is a simple example:

[auth:example]
type = simple
username = foo
password = bar

[crawl:something]
type = some-complex-crawler
auth = auth:example
on_conflict = no-delete
tasks = 3

The auth:* sections

Sections whose names start with auth: are used to configure authenticators. An authenticator provides a username and a password to one or more crawlers.

Authenticators work similar to crawlers: A section represents an authenticator instance whose name is the rest of the section name. The type is specified by the type option.

Depending on an authenticator's type, it may have different options. For more details, see the type's documentation below. The only option common to all authenticators is type:

• type: The types are specified in this section.

Crawler types

The local crawler

This crawler crawls a local directory. It is really simple and mostly useful for testing different setups. The various delay options are meant to make the crawler simulate a slower, network-based crawler.

• target: Path to the local directory to crawl. (Required)
• crawl_delay: Artificial delay (in seconds) to simulate for crawl requests. (Default: 0.0)
• download_delay: Artificial delay (in seconds) to simulate for download requests. (Default: 0.0)
• download_speed: Download speed (in bytes per second) to simulate. (Optional)

The kit-ilias-web crawler

This crawler crawls the KIT ILIAS instance.

ILIAS is not great at handling too many concurrent requests. To avoid unnecessary load, please limit tasks to 1.

There is a spike in ILIAS usage at the beginning of lectures, so please don't run PFERD during those times.

If you're automatically running PFERD periodically (e. g. via cron or a systemd timer), please randomize the start time or at least don't use the full hour. For systemd timers, this can be accomplished using the RandomizedDelaySec option. Also, please schedule the script to run in periods of low activity. Running the script once per day should be fine.

• target: The ILIAS element to crawl. (Required)
  • desktop: Crawl your personal desktop
  • <course id>: Crawl the course with the given id
  • <url>: Crawl a given element by URL (preferably the permanent URL linked at the bottom of its ILIAS page)
• auth: Name of auth section to use for login. (Required)
• tfa_auth: Name of auth section to use for two-factor authentication. Only uses the auth section's password. (Default: Anonymous tfa authenticator)
• links: How to represent external links. (Default: fancy)
  • ignore: Don't download links.
  • plaintext: A text file containing only the URL.
  • fancy: A HTML file looking like the ILIAS link element.
  • internet-shortcut: An internet shortcut file (.url file).
• link_redirect_delay: Time (in seconds) until fancy link files will redirect to the actual URL. Set to a negative value to disable the automatic redirect. (Default: -1)
• videos: Whether to download videos. (Default: no)
• http_timeout: The timeout (in seconds) for all HTTP requests. (Default: 20.0)

Authenticator types

The simple authenticator

With this authenticator, the username and password can be set directly in the config file. If the username or password are not specified, the user is prompted via the terminal.

• username: The username. (Optional)
• password: The password. (Optional)

The credential-file authenticator

This authenticator reads a username and a password from a credential file.

• path: Path to the credential file. (Required)

The credential file has exactly two lines (trailing newline optional). The first line starts with username= and contains the username, the second line starts with password= and contains the password. The username and password may contain any characters except a line break.

username=AzureDiamond
password=hunter2

The keyring authenticator

This authenticator uses the system keyring to store passwords. The username can be set directly in the config file. If the username is not specified, the user is prompted via the terminal. If the keyring contains no entry or the entry is incorrect, the user is prompted for a password via the terminal and the password is stored in the keyring.

• username: The username. (Optional)
• keyring_name: The service name PFERD uses for storing credentials. (Default: PFERD)

The tfa authenticator

This authenticator prompts the user on the console for a two-factor authentication token. The token is provided as password and it is not cached. This authenticator does not support usernames.

Transformation rules

Transformation rules are rules for renaming and excluding files and directories. They are specified line-by-line in a crawler's transform option. When a crawler needs to apply a rule to a path, it goes through this list top-to-bottom and choose the first matching rule.

To see this process in action, you can use the --debug-transforms or flag or the --explain flag.

Each line has the format SOURCE ARROW TARGET where TARGET is optional. SOURCE is either a normal path without spaces (e. g. foo/bar), or a string literal delimited by " or ' (e. g. "foo\" bar/baz"). Python's string escape syntax is supported. Trailing slashes are ignored. TARGET can be formatted like SOURCE, but it can also be a single exclamation mark without quotes (!). ARROW is one of -->, -name->, -exact->, -re-> and -name-re->

If a rule's target is !, this means that when the rule matches on a path, the corresponding file or directory is ignored. If a rule's target is missing, the path is matched but not modified.

The --> arrow

The --> arrow is a basic renaming operation. If a path begins with SOURCE, that part of the path is replaced with TARGET. This means that the rule foo/bar --> baz would convert foo/bar into baz, but also foo/bar/xyz into baz/xyz. The rule foo --> ! would ignore a directory named foo as well as all its contents.

The -name-> arrow

The -name-> arrow lets you rename files and directories by their name, regardless of where they appear in the file tree. Because of this, its SOURCE must not contain multiple path segments, only a single name. This restriction does not apply to its TARGET. The -name-> arrow is not applied recursively to its own output to prevent infinite loops.

For example, the rule foo -name-> bar/baz would convert a/foo into a/bar/baz and a/foo/b/c/foo into a/bar/baz/b/c/bar/baz. The rule foo -name-> ! would ignore all directories and files named foo.

The -exact-> arrow

The -exact-> arrow requires the path to match SOURCE exactly. This means that the rule foo/bar -exact-> baz would still convert foo/bar into baz, but foo/bar/xyz would be unaffected. Also, foo -exact-> ! would only ignore foo, but not its contents (if it has any). The examples below show why this is useful.

The -re-> arrow

The -re-> arrow uses regular expressions. SOURCE is a regular expression that must match the entire path. If this is the case, then the capturing groups are available in TARGET for formatting.

TARGET uses Python's format string syntax. The n-th capturing group can be referred to as {g<n>} (e. g. {g3}). {g0} refers to the original path. If capturing group n's contents are a valid integer, the integer value is available as {i<n>} (e. g. {i3}). If capturing group n's contents are a valid float, the float value is available as {f<n>} (e. g. {f3}). If a capturing group is not present (e. g. when matching the string cd with the regex (ab)?cd), the corresponding variables are not defined.

Python's format string syntax has rich options for formatting its arguments. For example, to left-pad the capturing group 3 with the digit 0 to width 5, you can use {i3:05}.

PFERD even allows you to write entire expressions inside the curly braces, for example {g2.lower()} or {g3.replace(' ', '_')}.

The -name-re-> arrow

The -name-re> arrow is like a combination of the -name-> and -re-> arrows. Instead of the SOURCE being the name of a directory or file, it's a regex that is matched against the names of directories and files. TARGET works like the -re-> arrow's target.

For example, the arrow (.*)\.jpeg -name-re-> {g1}.jpg will rename all .jpeg extensions into .jpg. The arrow \..+ -name-re-> ! will ignore all files and directories starting with ..

Example: Tutorials

You have an ILIAS course with lots of tutorials, but are only interested in a single one.

tutorials/
  |- tut_01/
  |- tut_02/
  |- tut_03/
  ...

You can use a mix of normal and exact arrows to get rid of the other ones and move the tutorials/tut_02/ folder to my_tut/:

tutorials/tut_02 --> my_tut
tutorials -exact->
tutorials --> !

The second rule is required for many crawlers since they use the rules to decide which directories to crawl. If it was missing when the crawler looks at tutorials/, the third rule would match. This means the crawler would not crawl the tutorials/ directory and thus not discover that tutorials/tut02/ existed.

Since the second rule is only relevant for crawling, the TARGET is left out.

Example: Lecture slides

You have a course with slides like Lecture 3: Linear functions.PDF and you would like to rename them to 03_linear_functions.pdf.

Lectures/
  |- Lecture 1: Introduction.PDF
  |- Lecture 2: Vectors and matrices.PDF
  |- Lecture 3: Linear functions.PDF
  ...

To do this, you can use the most powerful of arrows: The regex arrow.

"Lectures/Lecture (\\d+): (.*)\\.PDF" -re-> "Lectures/{i1:02}_{g2.lower().replace(' ', '_')}.pdf"

Note the escaped backslashes on the SOURCE side.

Example: Crawl a python project

You are crawling a python project and want to ignore all hidden files (files whose name starts with a .), all __pycache__ directories and all markdown files (for some weird reason).

.gitignore
.mypy_cache/
.venv/
CONFIG.md
PFERD/
  |- __init__.py
  |- __main__.py
  |- __pycache__/
  |- authenticator.py
  |- config.py
  ...
README.md
...

For this task, the name arrows can be used. They are variants of the normal arrows that only look at the file name instead of the entire path.

\..*        -name-re-> !
__pycache__ -name->    !
.*\.md      -name-re-> !