How do I install Pholcus on my system?

Pholcus is a distributed, high-concurrency, and powerful web crawler software written in the Go language. If you're interested in using Pholcus for web scraping or data mining, you'll need to set it up on your system. The following steps will guide you through the installation process of Pholcus:

Prerequisites

Before installing Pholcus, you need to have Go (Golang) installed on your machine. You can download and install Go from the official website: https://golang.org/dl/

Make sure that you have set up your Go workspace and GOPATH correctly. Normally, your GOPATH is located in your home directory (~/go on Unix-like systems or %USERPROFILE%\go on Windows).

Installing Pholcus

Once you have Go installed, you can get Pholcus using the go get command. Open your terminal or command prompt and run the following command:

go get -u github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus

This command will fetch the Pholcus package and its dependencies and install them in your GOPATH.

Building Pholcus

After installing Pholcus, navigate to the Pholcus directory in your workspace and build the project:

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus
go build

This will compile Pholcus and generate an executable file within the same directory. On Windows, the executable file will be named pholcus.exe, while on Unix-like systems, it will simply be pholcus.

Running Pholcus

With Pholcus built, you can now run the crawler. Execute the following command to start Pholcus:

./pholcus

On Windows, you would use:

pholcus.exe

This will launch the Pholcus web UI by default, which you can access by opening a web browser and navigating to http://localhost:8080.

Using Pholcus as a Library

Pholcus can also be used as a library in your Go projects. To do this, you can import Pholcus into your Go code and use its API to create custom spiders and crawlers.

Here's a simple example of how to use Pholcus in your Go code:

package main

import (
    "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/exec"
    _ "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus_lib" // This is required to import the default pholcus spiders
)

func main() {
    exec.DefaultRun("web")
}

This code snippet imports Pholcus and runs it with the default web UI. You can customize the spiders and the crawling logic according to your needs.

For more detailed usage and custom configurations, you may need to refer to the Pholcus documentation or source code, which provides more in-depth information about creating spiders, setting up crawl parameters, and processing scraped data. The official Pholcus GitHub repository is a good place to start: https://github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus

Remember to always comply with the robots.txt of websites and ensure that your web scraping activities are ethical and legal.