What is crawler4j?

yasserg/crawler4j — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-26

★ 4,624JavaAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((crawler4j))
    What it does
      Follows links automatically
      Downloads pages
      Multi-threaded crawling
    Programming model
      Extend WebCrawler
      shouldVisit method
      visit method
    Configuration
      Max depth setting
      Page limit
      robots.txt support
      Politeness delay
    Examples included
      Basic domain crawler
      Image downloader
      Dual crawler
      PostgreSQL integration

mindmap root((crawler4j)) What it does Follows links automatically Downloads pages Multi-threaded crawling Programming model Extend WebCrawler shouldVisit method visit method Configuration Max depth setting Page limit robots.txt support Politeness delay Examples included Basic domain crawler Image downloader Dual crawler PostgreSQL integration

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Crawl a website and extract all text content by overriding the visit method in your WebCrawler subclass

USE CASE 2

Download all images from a domain into a local folder using the built-in image downloader example

USE CASE 3

Index crawled web pages into a PostgreSQL database using the provided database integration example

USE CASE 4

Run two separate crawlers with different URL policies at the same time to scrape multiple sites in parallel

What is it built with?

JavaMavenGradle

How does it compare?

	yasserg/crawler4j	gabrielemariotti/cardslib	romandanylyk/pageindicatorview
Stars	4,624	4,621	4,628
Language	Java	Java	Java
Setup difficulty	easy	hard	easy
Complexity	2/5	3/5	2/5
Audience	developer	developer	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Add the Maven Central dependency in your pom.xml or build.gradle, no external services required for basic crawling.

License not described in the explanation.

So what is it?

crawler4j is a Java library for building web crawlers. A web crawler is a program that starts at one or more seed URLs, downloads those pages, finds all the links on them, then follows those links and repeats the process across an entire website (or the whole web, if you choose). crawler4j gives Java developers a simple API to do this without writing all the link-following and HTTP fetching logic from scratch. The programming model is straightforward. You create a class that extends WebCrawler and implement two methods: shouldVisit, which decides whether a given URL should be fetched at all (for example, you might skip image and stylesheet files, or restrict crawling to a single domain), and visit, which runs every time a page is downloaded and receives the page's text, HTML, and the list of outgoing links. You also write a short controller class that sets the seed URLs, the folder where crawl data is stored between runs, and the number of threads to run in parallel. Configuration options let you set a maximum crawl depth (how many links away from the seed you will follow), a maximum number of pages to download, whether to follow HTTPS links, how long to wait between requests, and whether to honor the politeness rules described in a site's robots.txt file (which specifies pages that should not be crawled). The repository includes several example programs: a basic domain crawler, an image downloader that saves files to a folder, an example of running two separate crawlers with different policies at the same time, a graceful shutdown example, and an integration example that saves crawled content into a PostgreSQL database. The library is available through Maven Central and works with both Maven and Gradle projects.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1

Using crawler4j, write a Java WebCrawler subclass that crawls a news website, extracts the article title and body text from each page, and saves them to a CSV file.

Prompt 2

I want to use crawler4j to download all PDF files linked from a university website. Show me the shouldVisit and visit methods that filter for PDF URLs and save each file to disk.

Prompt 3

Set up a crawler4j controller that seeds from a homepage, limits crawl depth to 3 levels, respects robots.txt, and waits 500ms between requests to avoid overloading the server.

Prompt 4

Using the crawler4j PostgreSQL example as a starting point, show me how to save the crawled URL, page title, and outgoing links into a database table for later analysis.

Frequently asked questions