photonvskatana

GPL-3.0 61 3 12,807

1.4 thousand (month) Aug 24 2018 1.1.9(2018-10-21 03:39:17 ago)

16,499 6 18 MIT

Nov 07 2022 v1.5.0(2026-03-10 14:52:47 ago)

Photon is a Python library for web scraping. It is designed to be lightweight and fast, and can be used to extract data from websites and web pages. Photon can extract the following data while crawling:

URLs (in-scope & out-of-scope)
URLs with parameters (example.com/gallery.php?id=2)
Intel (emails, social media accounts, amazon buckets etc.)
Files (pdf, png, xml etc.)
Secret keys (auth/API keys & hashes)
JavaScript files & Endpoints present in them
Strings matching custom regex pattern
Subdomains & DNS related data

The extracted information is saved in an organized manner or can be exported as json.

Katana is a next-generation web crawling and spidering framework written in Go by ProjectDiscovery. It is designed for fast, comprehensive endpoint and asset discovery and is widely used in the security research and bug bounty communities.

Katana offers multiple crawling modes:

Standard mode Fast HTTP-based crawling without a browser. Parses HTML, JavaScript files, and other resources to discover endpoints and links.
Headless mode Uses a headless Chrome browser for crawling JavaScript-rendered pages and single-page applications (SPAs).
Passive mode Discovers URLs from external sources (Wayback Machine, CommonCrawl, etc.) without actively visiting the target.

Key features include:

Scope control Configurable crawl scope with regex patterns for including/excluding URLs, domains, and file extensions.
JavaScript parsing Extracts endpoints from JavaScript files, inline scripts, and AJAX requests even in standard (non-headless) mode.
Customizable output Filter and format output with field selection, JSON output, and custom templates.
Rate limiting Built-in rate limiting and concurrency control to avoid overwhelming targets.
Proxy support HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy support with rotation.
Form filling Can detect and auto-fill forms to discover endpoints behind form submissions.

While Katana was designed for security research and reconnaissance, its fast crawling capabilities and JavaScript parsing make it equally useful for web scraping discovery and sitemap generation.

Highlights

fastpopularlarge-scale

Example Use

```python from photon import Photon #Create a new Photon instance ph = Photon() #Extract data from a specific element of the website url = "https://www.example.com" selector = "div.main" data = ph.get_data(url, selector) #Print the extracted data print(data) #Extract data from multiple websites asynchronously urls = ["https://www.example1.com", "https://www.example2.com"] data = ph.get_data_async(urls) ```

```go package main import ( "context" "math" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/engine/standard" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/output" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/types" ) func main() { // Configure crawl options options := &types.Options{ MaxDepth: 3, FieldScope: "rdn", // restrict to root domain BodyReadSize: math.MaxInt, Timeout: 10, Concurrency: 10, Parallelism: 10, Delay: 0, RateLimit: 150, Strategy: "depth-first", OnResult: func(result output.Result) { // Process each discovered URL println(result.Request.URL) }, } // Create and run the crawler crawlerOptions, _ := types.NewCrawlerOptions(options) defer crawlerOptions.Close() crawler, _ := standard.New(crawlerOptions) defer crawler.Close() // Start crawling _ = crawler.Crawl("https://example.com") } ```

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