internetarchive/heritrix3

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project.

Java

3,332

2,115 commits

updated Oct 13, 2026

See the code

README

Heritrix

Maven Central Version Docker Javadoc LICENSE

Introduction

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project. Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix, or misspelled or missaid as heratrix/heritix/heretix/heratix) is an archaic word for heiress (woman who inherits). Since our crawler seeks to collect and preserve the digital artifacts of our culture for the benefit of future researchers and generations, this name seemed apt.

Crawl Operators!

Heritrix is designed to respect the robots.txt exclusion directives and META nofollow tags. Please consider the load your crawl will place on seed sites and set politeness policies accordingly. Also, always identify your crawl with contact information in the User-Agent so sites that may be adversely affected by your crawl can contact you or adapt their server behavior accordingly.

Documentation

Developer Documentation

Latest Releases

Information about releases can be found here.

License

Heritrix is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0

Some individual source code files are subject to or offered under other licenses. See the included LICENSE.txt file for more information.

Heritrix is distributed with the libraries it depends upon. The libraries can be found under the lib directory in the release distribution, and are used under the terms of their respective licenses, which are included alongside the libraries in the lib directory.

heritrix
java
warc
webcrawling

internetarchive/heritrix3

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project.

Java

3,332

2,115 commits

updated Oct 13, 2026

See the code

README

Heritrix

Maven Central Version Docker Javadoc LICENSE

Introduction

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project. Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix, or misspelled or missaid as heratrix/heritix/heretix/heratix) is an archaic word for heiress (woman who inherits). Since our crawler seeks to collect and preserve the digital artifacts of our culture for the benefit of future researchers and generations, this name seemed apt.

Crawl Operators!

Heritrix is designed to respect the robots.txt exclusion directives and META nofollow tags. Please consider the load your crawl will place on seed sites and set politeness policies accordingly. Also, always identify your crawl with contact information in the User-Agent so sites that may be adversely affected by your crawl can contact you or adapt their server behavior accordingly.

Documentation

Developer Documentation

Latest Releases

Information about releases can be found here.

License

Heritrix is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0

Some individual source code files are subject to or offered under other licenses. See the included LICENSE.txt file for more information.

Heritrix is distributed with the libraries it depends upon. The libraries can be found under the lib directory in the release distribution, and are used under the terms of their respective licenses, which are included alongside the libraries in the lib directory.

heritrix
java
warc
webcrawling

Project health

Overall

5.6/10

Maintained

10/10

Code review

2/10
OpenSSF Scorecard

Significant stargazers

(top 24 of 26)

Mads Marquart

221 followers · starred Jun 2021

gaurav

289 followers · starred Mar 2025

Alexandre Dulaunoy

1,492 followers · starred Aug 2026

Bruno Borges

1,103 followers · starred Sep 2021