digininja/CeWL

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2801 stars · 319 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

CeWL is a Ruby command-line tool that spiders a target website to a specified depth and collects unique words into a custom wordlist for use with password crackers such as John the Ripper. It also ships with FAB, a companion CLI that extracts author/creator metadata from already-downloaded files using exiftool.

Use cases

• generate a custom wordlist from a target website
• spider a site to collect words for password cracking
• build a targeted dictionary for a password audit
• create wordlists for John the Ripper from company web content
• extract author and creator metadata from downloaded documents
• automate wordlist generation for pentest engagements

When to choose

• you need an organization-specific dictionary rather than a generic wordlist
• you are running a targeted password audit against a known site or company
• you want to mine site terminology, product names, and jargon into a cracking list
• you need to bag author/creator metadata from a pile of downloaded files

When to avoid

• you need a general-purpose web scraper for data extraction rather than wordlist building
• you have no target website and just want a generic dictionary
• you plan deep crawls with offsite linking, where it can drift onto unrelated domains
• you cannot install Ruby and its gem dependencies including exiftool

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

web-scraping penetration-testing security penetration-testing cli ruby cross-platform windows wordlist-generator password-cracking password-audit web-spider metadata-extraction john-the-ripper kali-linux dictionary-attack linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="digininja/CeWL")