Screaming Frog v9.0 / Docker / Debian 8 / Ubuntu Remote Desktop

You would like to setup a remote desktop with Screaming Frog to crawl huge websites (+1 million pages) ?

You only need your crawler to run once a month ? (few hours or days)

You have some basic technical skills and want to discover the power of the Cloud ?

An Ubuntu Remote Desktop in a cloud instance in OVH offers a good  price to performance solution. (1,5 € per day / 2$ or half this price if you take a monthly subscription )

What we will do to get an army of crawler:

1. Open an OVH account or login
2. Create a new Cloud Project
3. Create a Server (an instance)
4. Specify in advance that we want Docker to be installed (it will make everything super simple to setup)
5. Install a Docker container containing Ubuntu + A remote Desktop based on NoVNC
6. Connect to Ubuntu with Chrome or any browser in one click 🙂
7. Install Screaming Frog with 2 commands
8. Create a Snapshot in Openstack (= OVH)
9. Create as many server containing Screaming Frog in just ONE clic

Setup a new Cloud Instance

• Go here and create an account / login: https://www.ovh.ie/public-cloud/instances/
• Then here: https://www.ovh.com/manager/cloud/index.html
• Order > Cloud Project > Fill the forms
• In your project > Infrastructure > You can add a new server in “Actions” > Add Server
• Take the 7GB RAM & 100GB SSD for this test.
• You will need 60 GB of disk for 1 Million URL Crawled
• Setup your ssh key (Google is your best friend to get help, it’s OS specific)

Setup the server

• Connect to the server with a terminal
  • user@IP of your server
• Then copy and paste each line one by one:
  • apt-get update
  • apt-get upgrade
  • sudo docker run -it –rm -p 6080:80 -p 5900:5900 -e VNC_PASSWORD=MyPassWordToReplaceByWhatYouWant dorowu/ubuntu-desktop-lxde-vnc

Setup Screaming Frog

• Connect to https://IP-OF-YOUR-SERVER:6080/ with the password you used for “VNC_PASSWORD=”
• Open a terminal in Ubuntu (in the NoVNC session – icon in the bottom left of the Ubuntu desktop)
• Then copy and paste each line one by one:
  • sudo apt-get install screen wget
  • wget https://download.screamingfrog.co.uk/products/seo-spider/screamingfrogseospider_9.0_all.deb
  • dpkg -i screamingfrogseospider_9.0_all.deb
  • sudo apt-get -f install
• Screaming Frog is now installed 🙂
• You can try it here:
  • Bottom left icon > Internet > Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• You will have to setup the Storage to disk to crawl huge websites
  • Screaming Frog > Configuration > System > Storage

Next step: create a snapshot of this in OVH (to be continued if you liked this article !)

Quentin Adt

✓ Founder of Kelogs, a SaaS SEO Crawler & Log Analyzer

✓ International SEO Consultant (Freelance)

✓ Over 10 years of SEO experience

✓ Consultant to countless small and big businesses over the decade

Read more about me, myself and I.