4cat

4chan thread catalog generator.

System requirements

• Ruby 2.0 or higher.
• Gems
  • daemons if you want to use the provided daemonizer.
  • erubis for html output.
  • nokogiri with libxml 2.7.7 or higher.
• A webserver, anything that can serve static files is fine.

Usage

To manually refresh a board use refresh.rb <slug>
Example: ./refresh.rb jp will generate a catalog for /jp/ under ./public/jp/
Use this to test your installation or, if you host multiple boards, to pre-fetch thumbnails and minimize hammering during the first run.

To continuously run the crawler use run.rb
The script will start, kill and reload worker threads according to the settings in config.rb
Pass -gentle <seconds> as argument to add a delay betwen the start of each worker thread.

To run the crawler in the background use daemon.rb
You can pass additional arguments to the daemonized script by separating them with two hyphens: daemon.rb start -- -gentle 20
To reload the configuration file, send a SIGHUP to the process, or use daemon.rb reload. Only board specific settings will be reloaded.

Settings

Settings are stored inside the config.rb file as a Ruby Hash (minus the wrapping curly brackets).
Check fourcat.rb for the complete list of available options.

Some basic options:

Symbol: refresh_delay
Type: Integer
Default: 60

Base refresh delay in seconds. Will be (loosely) adjusted according to the board's speed.

Symbol: refresh_range
Type: Array of Integers
Default: [ 60, 300 ]

Minimum and maximum refresh delays.

Symbol: title
Type: String
Default: /<board's remote slug>/ - Catalog

Board's title. Also used in RSS feeds.

Symbol: write_rss
Type: true, false
Default: false

Generate RSS feed.
You will need to set the web_uri option to point to your catalog's base URL.

Symbol: stats
Type: true, false
Default: false

Track statistics. This doesn't generate any HTML, you will need to set up a cron task to run make_stats.rb for that.

Symbol: spoiler_text
Type: true, false
Default: false

Hide spoilered text in the catalog.

Symbol: remove_{exif,oekaki,fortune}
Type: true, false
Default: false

Remove EXIF/Oekaki/Fortune metadata.

Symbol: filename_tag
Type: true, false
Default: false

Generate a filterable tags from filenames.

Symbol: archive
Type: String, nil
Default: nil

Fuuka style archive host. ex: archive.example.com