Credentials

Credentials can be added so that Heritrix can gain access to areas of Web sites requiring authentication.  Credentials are configured in the Spring configuration file, crawler-beans.cxml.  The following example shows a configured Credential.

<bean id="credential"
   class="org.archive.modules.credential.HttpAuthenticationCredential">

    <property name="domain">
        <value>
            domain
        </value>
    </property>

    <property name="realm">
        <value>
            myrealm
        </value>
    </property>

    <property name="login">
        <value>
            mylogin
        </value>
    </property>

    <property name="password">
        <value>
            mypassword
        </value>
    </property>

 </bean>

One of the settings for a credential is its domain.  It is therefore possible to create all credentials at a global level.  However, because this can cause excessive unneeded checking of credentials, it is recommended that credentials be added to a domain override.  This way, the credential is only checked when the relevant domain is being crawled.

Heritrix offers two types of authentication: RFC2617 (BASIC and DIGEST Auth) and POST and GET of an HTML form.