Web page mirroring (wget) in Ruby

Doing a basic search for 'wget in ruby' or 'web page mirroring in ruby' generally turns up a number of unimaginative (not to mention lazy) examples of invoking wget from a sub-shell. While these solutions often meet the immediate needs of their authors, they provide no guidance for those who need to implement the mirroring of remote documents as part of a larger data processing or data management application.

The following are the results of implementing web page mirroring (as performed by non-recursive wget, or by Firefox's Save As...[Web Page, Complete] feature) in such an application. The provided code will download an HTML document, parse it for JS, CSS, and image files (referred to as resources), download those files to the destination directory, rewrite the references to those resources so they refer to the local (downloaded) files, then write the updated HTML document to the destination directory.

The bulk of the work is done by Nokogiri, which parses the HTML document and supports XPath queries on its elements. Fetching remote documents is handled by Ruby's built-in net/http module.


#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# faux-wget.rb : example of performing wget-style mirroring
require 'nokogiri'
require 'net/http'
require 'fileutils'
require 'uri'

The implementation uses a single RemoteDocument class which takes a URI in its constructor and provides the high-level method mirror which downloads and localizes the document at the URI.

The mirror method invokes four helper methods:

• html_get will download the remote document
• Nokogiri::HTML parses the downloaded document
• process_contents extracts resource tags from the document
• save_locally localizes all resources

The document parsing is straighforward: Nokogiri does all the work, and process_contents simply performs XPath queries to build lists of CSS, JS and IMG tags. The document fetching is also pretty straightforward; support for response codes in the 3xx (redirect) and 4xx-5xx series (not found,
unauthorized, internal error, etc) adds only a couple of lines of code

The save_locally method begins by creating the destination directory if it does not exist. If the document contains a BASE tag, it is removed - which makes the mirrored page behave better in most web browsers. Next, the localize method is invoked on all of the resource tags. Finally, the document is written to the destination directory.

The localize method performs all of the interesting work.

It begins with a random delay of tens of milliseconds, which prevents most web servers from blocking the barrage of requests when downloading the resource files. The resource URL is obtained from the HREF attribute of CSS tags, or from the SRC attribute of JS and IMG tags.

This URL can be absolute or relative (e.g. the file "http://foo.com/images/bar.jpg" may be referenced as "images/bar.jpg"), so an absolute URL is generated from the document URI if needed. The URL is then converted to a local path, meaning that the downloaded resource can end up in the directory "images" inside the destination directory.

The remote resource file is then downloaded to this path, and the URL in the tag attribute (which is part of the original document's source) is replaced with the local path to the downloaded resource.

The local path generation logic in localize_url is a bit simplistic (resulting in ugly directory trees), and the mirroring process itself is non-recursive (i.e. HREF attributes in A tags are detected but ignored). The caller can easily use the RemoteDocument object to provide additional services: the parsed contents of the HTML document are available in the contents property, the metadata tags (e.g. keywords) are available in the meta property, and all links found in the document are available in the links property.


=begin rdoc
Wrap a URI and provide methods for download, parsing, and mirroring of remote HTML document.
=end
class RemoteDocument
  attr_reader :uri
  attr_reader :contents
  attr_reader :css_tags, :js_tags, :img_tags, :meta, :links


  def initialize(uri)
    @uri = uri
  end


=begin rdoc
Download, parse, and save the RemoteDocument and all resources (JS, CSS, 
images) in the specified directory.
=end
  def mirror(dir)
    source = html_get(uri)
    @contents = Nokogiri::HTML( source )
    process_contents
    save_locally(dir)
  end


=begin rdoc
Extract resources (CSS, JS, Image files) from the parsed html document.
=end
  def process_contents
    @css_tags = @contents.xpath( '//link[@rel="stylesheet"]' )
    @js_tags = @contents.xpath('//script[@src]')
    @img_tags = @contents.xpath( '//img[@src]' )
    # Note: meta tags and links are unused in this example
    find_meta_tags
    find_links
  end


=begin rdoc
Extract contents of META tags to @meta Hash.
=end
  def find_meta_tags
    @meta = {}
    @contents.xpath('//meta').each do |tag|
      last_name = name = value = nil
      tag.attributes.each do |key, attr|
        if attr.name == 'content'
          value = attr.value
        elsif attr.name == 'name'
          name = attr.value
        else
          last_name = attr.value
        end
      end
      name = last_name if not name
      @meta[name] = value if name && value
    end
  end


=begin rdoc
Generate a Hash URL -> Title of all (unique) links in document.
=end
  def find_links
    @links = {}
    @contents.xpath('//a[@href]').each do |tag| 
      @links[tag[:href]] = (tag[:title] || '') if (! @links.include? tag[:href])
    end
  end


=begin rdoc
Generate a local, legal filename for url in dir.
=end
  def localize_url(url, dir)
    path = url.gsub(/^[|[:alpha]]+:\/\//, '')
    path.gsub!(/^[.\/]+/, '')
    path.gsub!(/[^-_.\/[:alnum:]]/, '_')
    File.join(dir, path)
  end


=begin rdoc
Construct a valid URL for an HREF or SRC parameter. This uses the document URI
to convert a relative URL ('/doc') to an absolute one ('http://foo.com/doc').
=end
  def url_for(str)
    return str if str =~ /^[|[:alpha:]]+:\/\//
    File.join((uri.path.empty?) ? uri.to_s : File.dirname(uri.to_s), str)
  end


=begin rdoc
Send GET to url, following redirects if required.
=end
  def html_get(url)
    resp = Net::HTTP.get_response(url)
    if ['301', '302', '307'].include? resp.code
      url = URI.parse resp['location']
    elsif resp.code.to_i >= 400
      $stderr.puts "[#{resp.code}] #{url}"
      return
    end
    Net::HTTP.get url
  end


=begin rdoc
Download a remote file and save it to the specified path
=end
  def download_resource(url, path)
    FileUtils.mkdir_p File.dirname(path)
    the_uri = URI.parse(url)
    if the_uri
      data = html_get the_uri
      File.open(path, 'wb') { |f| f.write(data) } if data
    end
  end


=begin rdoc
Download resource for attribute 'sym' in 'tag' (e.g. :src in IMG), saving it to
'dir' and modifying the tag attribute to reflect the new, local location.
=end
  def localize(tag, sym, dir)
    delay
    url = tag[sym]
    resource_url = url_for(url)
    dest = localize_url(url, dir)
    download_resource(resource_url, dest)
    tag[sym.to_s] = dest.partition(File.dirname(dir) + File::SEPARATOR).last
  end


=begin rdoc
Attempt to "play nice" with web servers by sleeping for a few ms.
=end
  def delay
    sleep(rand / 100)
  end


=begin rdoc
Download all resources to destination directory, rewriting in-document tags
to reflect the new resource location, then save the localized document.
Creates destination directory if it does not exist.
=end
  def save_locally(dir)
    Dir.mkdir(dir) if (! File.exist? dir)
   
    # remove HTML BASE tag if it exists
    @contents.xpath('//base').each { |t| t.remove }


    # save resources
    @img_tags.each { |tag| localize(tag, :src, File.join(dir, 'images')) }
    @js_tags.each { |tag| localize(tag, :src, File.join(dir, 'js')) }
    @css_tags.each { |tag| localize(tag, :href, File.join(dir, 'css')) }


    save_path = File.join(dir, File.basename(uri.to_s))
    save_path += '.html' if save_path !~ /\.((html?)|(txt))$/
    File.open(save_path, 'w') { |f| f.write(@contents.to_html) }
  end
end


Finally. the source code file needs a driver method to make it useful from the command line. This one takes a URL and a destination directory as its parameters:


# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
if __FILE__ == $0
  if ARGV.count < 2
    $stderr.puts "Usage: #{$0} URL DIR"
    exit 1
  end


  url = ARGV.shift
  dir = ARGV.shift
  doc = RemoteDocument.new(URI.parse(url))
  doc.mirror(dir)
end