README

social-media-scanner

Scan websites for links to social media

Support

Social Media Scanner supports the following links:

Facebook
Google +
Twitter
Linkedin
Instagram
Pinterest
Reddit
Tumblr
VK

Installation

You can install Social Media Scanner through npm

npm install --save social-media-scanner

Usage

Setup

Start by requiring the node module

var socialMediaScanner = require("social-media-scanner");

Then you can start scanning a website using .scan(url);. This will create a new scanner object for this website.

var site1 = socialMediaScanner.scan("http://example.com");

Events

Social Media Scanner has four events: pageStart, pageDone, done and error.
You can set callbacks for these events with:

site1.on("error", function (err) {});

pageStart

This event is called at the start of a scan of a page.
The callback for this event has a page object parameter and a skip method.
The page object has the following properties:

url: The url of the page which just started scanning
key: A unique key for this page
found: an object with a list of all found links (links: string[]) and a list of all found media(media: string[]). page.found.media and page.found.links are just empty arrays at the start of the scan

When the skip method is called the page won't be scanned

site1.on("pageStart", function (page, skip) {
  if (page.url === "http://example.com/example") {
    skip();
    return;
  }
  console.log("Started scanning: " + page.url);
});

pageDone

This event returns the same object as above except for page.found.media and page.found.links which now hold values

site1.on("pageDone", function (page) {
  console.log("Done scanning: " + page.url);
  console.log("Found media: " + page.found.media);
  console.log("Found links: " + page.found.links);
});

done

This event fires at the end of the scan and returns a list of all media found and all scanned pages

site1.on("done", function (media, pages) {
  console.log("Found: " + media); // Shows a string array with all found media
  console.log("Scanned pages: " + pages); // each page has the same structure as the pages in the previous events
});

error

This event fires everytime the scanner encounters an error.

site1.on("error", function (err) {
  console.log(err);
});

Properties

A scanner has 3 properties:

max: The max amount of pages to search through (default: 100).
interval: The amount of milliseconds between each page scan (default: 250).
skipExternalResources: Social Media Scanner loads external javascript files because some websites get their content from scripts (for example: React websites).
Default: false

// skipExternalResources example
site1.on("pageStart", function (page) {
  if (page.url === "http://example.com/a-specific/path") {
    site1.skipExternalResources = false;
  } else {
    site1.skipExternalResources = true;
  }
});

methods

getMedia(): Returns a list of media to check for
addMedium(med: string[]|string): Add one medium or a list of media to the list of media which will be used to check urls
removeMedium(med: string[]|string): Remove one medium or a list of media from the list of media which will be used to check urls
blockURL(url: string): The URL passed to this method won't be scanned

Starting the scan

After everything is setup you can start the scan with:

site1.start();

Usage no npm install needed!