sphinx-doc / sphinx-doc/sphinx
Linkcheck support for robots.txt
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- Python
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Description
I am a sysadmin and one of the sites that I admin www.gnu.org is frequently mentioned in documentation compiled by Sphinx.
After a scream test, I found that Sphinx's linkcheck is the reason I am noticing Sphinx user-agents in my logs. I am seeing several HEAD requests in bursts at the same second from Sphinx. I am seeing this behavior from several hundred IPs. My robots.txt file requests Crawl-delay: 4 instead.
Can you add robots.txt support for linkcheck or a default delay when requesting from the same site?
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
The issue names Sphinx's linkcheck but no file or test. Start by tracing linkcheck's request handling and review how robots.txt Crawl-delay is represented; compare that approach with applying a default per-site delay. Done requires an agreed behavior that prevents bursts of requests and is covered by tests.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- documentation, tooling
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100