# Photon

> Fast Python web crawler designed for OSINT that extracts URLs, files, emails, keys, and DNS data.

Photon is an open-source crawler for OSINT work, written in Python and published by s0md3v on GitHub under the GPL v3.0 license. It crawls a target site and pulls out URLs, files, intel such as emails and social media accounts, secret keys, and subdomain data. The latest release listed is v1.3.0, published 2019-04-05.

## What It Is

Photon is a command-line information-gathering crawler. You point it at a target URL and it follows links, collecting data while it goes. Results are saved in an organized structure and can be exported as JSON.

## What It Extracts

While crawling, Photon can collect in-scope and out-of-scope URLs, URLs with parameters, files (pdf, png, xml and others), and intel such as emails, social media accounts and Amazon buckets. It also finds auth/API keys and hashes, JavaScript files and the endpoints inside them, strings matching a custom regex, and subdomains with DNS-related data.

## Controls and Plugins

Users can set timeout and delay, add seeds, and exclude URLs matching a regex. Plugins include wayback, which uses URLs archived by archive.org as seeds via the `--wayback` option, dnsdumpster for DNS data, and an exporter for formatted results. The README says Photon uses thread management to improve performance.

## Setup Path

Photon can be run from source or through a lightweight Python-Alpine Docker image, which the README describes as 103 MB. Results can be read from the Docker volume or from a mounted output folder. The `--update` option installs updates without losing saved data.

## Features
- Crawls URLs, including those with parameters
- Extracts emails, social media accounts and Amazon buckets
- Finds files, secret keys and hashes
- Extracts JavaScript files and endpoints
- Custom regex matching
- Subdomain and DNS data extraction
- Wayback Machine seed URLs
- JSON export
- Configurable timeout, delay and URL exclusion
- Docker image
- Self-update option

## Integrations
archive.org Wayback Machine, DNSDumpster, Docker

## Platforms
WINDOWS, MACOS, LINUX, API, CLI

## Pricing
Open Source

## Version
v1.3.0

## Links
- Website: https://github.com/s0md3v/Photon
- Documentation: https://github.com/s0md3v/Photon/wiki
- Repository: https://github.com/s0md3v/Photon
- EveryDev.ai: https://www.everydev.ai/tools/photon