Browsertrix Cloud

Browsertrix Cloud is a cloud-native crawling system, which supports a multi-user, multi-archive crawling system to run natively in the cloud via Kubernetes or locally via Docker.

The system currently includes support for the following:

• Fully API-driven, with OpenAPI specification for all APIs.
• Multiple users, registered via email and/or invited to join Archives.
• Crawling centered around Archives which are associated with an S3-compatible storage bucket.
• Users may be part of multiple archives and have different roles in different archives
• Archives contain crawler configs, which are passed to the crawler.
• Crawls launched via a crontab-based schedule or manually on-demand
• Crawls performed using Browsertrix Crawler.
• Crawl config includes an optional timeout, after which crawl is stopped gracefully.
• Crawl status is tracked in the DB (possible crawl states include: Completed, Partially-Complete (due to timeout or cancelation), Cancelation, Failure)

Deploying to Docker

To deploy via local Docker instance, copy the config.sample.env to config.env.

Docker Compose is required.

Then, run docker-compose build; docker-compose up -d to launch.

To update/relaunch, use ./docker-restart.sh.

The API should be available at: http://localhost:8000/docs

Note: When deployed in local Docker, failed crawls are not retried currently. Scheduling is handled by a subprocess, which stores active schedule in the DB.

Deploying to Kubernetes

To deploy to K8s, helm is required. Browsertrix Cloud comes with a helm chart, which can be installed as follows:

helm install -f ./chart/values.yaml btrix ./chart/

This will create a browsertrix-cloud service in the default namespace.

For a quick update, the following is recommended:

helm upgrade -f ./chart/values.yaml btrix ./chart/

Note: When deployed in Kubernetes, failed crawls are automatically retried. Scheduling is handled via Kubernetes Cronjobs, and crawl jobs are run in the crawlers namespace.

Browsertrix Cloud is currently in pre-alpha stages and not ready for production.