Everything was hardcoded for one deployment: hostname in mail subjects,
recipient address, log path, and a router name of "forgejo@docker" that
also appeared inside the user-agent regex. That last one fails silently
rather than loudly - on any instance whose Traefik router is named
something else, the regex matches nothing, every user-agent is dropped,
and the report claims zero bot traffic instead of erroring.
Move configuration to environment variables read from
/etc/crawler-alert.env, with defaults that suit a plain Traefik host.
Only CRAWLER_RECIPIENT is required, and the script now refuses to run
without it rather than mailing into the void. Anchor the user-agent
regex on the request counter instead of the router name.
SMTP can now be configured directly via CRAWLER_SMTP_*, so the tool no
longer requires Forgejo in Docker; borrowing credentials from app.ini
stays the default since it avoids a second copy of the password.
Unauthenticated and non-TLS local relays are handled.
Document the Traefik access log configuration in
traefik-accesslog.yml. This is the one real prerequisite: Traefik drops
all headers by default, so without an explicit User-Agent: keep there
is nothing to analyse. Includes the field layout the parser expects,
logrotate config, and the forwardedHeaders setup needed to recover real
client IPs from behind Cloudflare.
Rewrite README for someone arriving without context, and add a 0BSD
LICENSE so the code can actually be reused.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-5
The Traefik access log shows a large volume of requests carrying AI
crawler user-agents, but a user-agent header is self-declared and free
to forge. Over 2.27M requests (Nov 2025 - Aug 2026), most of that
traffic did not originate from the vendor it named: Claude-User was
4992/5000 forged, ChatGPT-User 2657/2670, Google-Extended 747/747. A
pool of roughly 100 Google Cloud hosts rotates through six vendor
identities and requests /.env, /terraform.tfstate and
/serviceAccountKey.json - credential harvesting, not crawling.
Counting these by user-agent alone makes the report worse than
useless: it attributes scraper load to vendors that never sent it, and
hides the fact that genuine crawler traffic is roughly 0.1% of
requests and fully robots.txt-compliant.
Verify instead against the vendors' published IP range lists (OpenAI,
Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Apple) and split each bot into
verified / spoofed / via-Cloudflare buckets. Requests arriving through
Cloudflare are reported separately rather than guessed at, since the
logged address is the CF edge and not the client.
Ranges are fetched at run time and cached, with fallback to the cache
when a vendor endpoint is unreachable, so an outage degrades the
report rather than breaking the weekly mail. The fetch sends an
explicit User-Agent: claude.com and cloudflare.com sit behind
Cloudflare, which 403s the default Python-urllib agent.
Only --weekly performs the fetch; the daily threshold alert is
unchanged and still runs without network access.
Assisted-by: Claude:opus-5
