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Tools / Crawler / Troubleshooting

FAQ

Which IP address of the Crawler can I add to my allowlist?

The Algolia Crawler uses this static external IP address: 34.66.202.43. You can add this IP address to your allowlist if necessary.

What is the user agent of the Crawler?

When fetching pages, the Algolia Crawler identifies itself with the following user agent: Algolia Crawler/xx.xx.xx, where xx.xx.xx represents a version number.

The version number at the end of the user agent string changes regularly as the product evolves.

You can allow this user agent in your robots.txt file: User-agent: Algolia Crawler without any version number. Allowing user agents manually—for example, through nginx or other custom validations may require changes to let the crawler fetch pages.

Consider allowing the IP address of the Algolia Crawler to your allowlist instead.

What can I crawl with the Crawler?

The Crawler aims at crawling content that’s solely owned by the user, whether it’s hosted on its own infrastructure or on a SaaS. Algolia automatically restricts the Crawler’s scope to a list of allowed domains. If you need to add an other domain to your allowed list go the Domains page and verify your domain.

One of my pages was not crawled

The reasons, why one of your pages wasn’t crawled, include:

  • Crawling a website completely can take hours depending on the size: make sure that the crawling operation has finished.
  • Some pages may not be linked with each other: make sure that there exists a way to navigate from the website’s start pages to the missing page, or that the missing page is listed in the sitemaps. If it is inaccessible, you may want to add its URL as a start URL in your crawler’s configuration file.
  • The page may have been ignored if it refers to a canonical URL, or if it doesn’t match a pathsToMatch in any of your crawler’s actions, or if it matches any exclusionPatterns. For more information, checkout the question: when are pages skipped or ignored?
  • If the page is rendered using JavaScript, you may need to set renderJavaScript to true in your configuration (note: this makes the crawling process slower).
  • If the page is behind a login wall, you may need to setup the login property of your configuration.

If none of these solve your problem, an error may have happened while crawling the page. Please check your logs using the Monitoring and URL Inspector tabs.

You can also use the URL tester in the Editor tab of the Admin to get details on why a URL was skipped / ignored.

The Crawler doesn’t see the same HTML as me

Sometimes, websites behave differently depending on the user agent they receive. You can see the HTML discovered by the Crawler in the URL Tester.

Url tester html

If this HTML is missing information, the last thing to check after trying to debug your selectors is to check whether it can be due to the Crawler’s user agent. You can do this with browser extensions or using curl. Send several requests with a few different user agents and compare the results.

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curl http://example.com
curl -H "User-Agent: Algolia Crawler" http://example.com
curl -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0" http://example.com

Sometimes, having a “robot” user agent is actually helpful: when they detect a web crawler, some websites return content that works without JavaScript.

The Crawler returns 403 HTTP errors for all of my pages

If you protect your website with a system that can prevent the Crawler from accessing your website, such as Cloudflare or Google Cloud Armor, make sure to allow either:

Otherwise, the Crawler can’t index your site and you’ll see errors with status 403.

How to see the Crawler tab in the Algolia dashboard?

  1. Make sure that your crawler configuration file was saved on crawler.algolia.com.
  2. Make sure that you have administrator ACL permissions on the indices specified in your crawler’s configuration file.
  3. Make sure that your appId and apiKey are correct and that they grant administrator permissions to the crawler for these indices.

When are pages skipped or ignored?

At addition time

Pages skipped at addition time are not added to the URL database. This can happen for two reasons:

  1. The URL doesn’t match at least one of your actions’ pathsToMatch.
  2. The URL matches one of your crawler’s exclusionPatterns.

At retrieval time

Pages skipped at retrieval time are added to the URL database, retrieved, but not processed. Those are flagged “Ignored” in the Crawler dashboard. This can happen for these reasons:

  1. The robots.txt check didn’t allow this URL to be crawled.
  2. The URL is a redirect. The crawler adds the redirect target to the URL database but skips the rest of the page.
  3. The page’s HTTP status code is not 200.
  4. The media type isn’t one of the expected ones.
  5. The page contains a canonical link. The crawler adds the canonical target as a page to crawl according to the same addition-time filters and then skip the current page.
  6. The robots meta tag in the HTML is set to noindex or none. For example, <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>. You can override this behavior by setting the ignoreNoIndex parameter to true.

When are records deleted?

Launching a crawl completely clears the state of your database. When your crawl completes, your old indices are overwritten by the data indexed during the new run. If you want to save a backup of your old index, set the saveBackup parameter of your crawler to true.

Crawler has SSL issues but my website works fine

You may encounter SSL-related errors when indexing your website using the Algolia Crawler, even though your website works fine in a web browser. That’s because web browsers have extra features to handle SSL certificates that the Crawler doesn’t provide.

UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE

This error generally happens when your website’s certificate chain is incomplete. When an intermediate certificate authority signs your SSL certificate, you need to install this intermediate certificate on your server.

Articles How certificate chains work
What is the SSL Certificate Chain?

Verify your certificate chain

To verify the validity of your certificate chain, you can use OpenSSL:

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openssl s_client -showcerts -connect algolia.com:443 -servername algolia.com
  • If the chain is valid, you should see Verify return code: 0 (ok) at the end, and no errors in the output.
  • If it’s invalid, you should either get:
    • Verify return code: 21 (unable to verify the first certificate) at the end.

    • Or errors in the verifications steps, such as:

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      CONNECTED(00000005)
depth=0 C = FR, L = PARIS, O = Algolia, CN = Algolia.com
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:1
depth=0 C = FR, L = PARIS, O = Algolia, CN = Algolia.com
verify error:num=21:unable to verify the first certificate
verify return:1

You can also do the check online.

Fix your server

The correct way to bundle the intermediate certificates depends on your web server. What’s My Chain Cert explains how to fix the issue for many popular web servers.

Can I crawl my site with an invalid certificate?

No. The Crawler doesn’t support sites with invalid certificates.

Does the crawler support RSS?

Yes, the crawler can discover links present in RSS feeds: it parses and extracts all <link> tags present in RSS files.

You can’t use the content of the RSS file to generate records: the crawler only extract links, for discovery purposes.

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