Spider

ZAP has 2 spiders that allow you to automatically explore web sites. The 'Spider' tool starts the 'traditional' spider. This crawls all of the web pages and follows all of the links that it can find. It is fast but it will not be able to follow links defined using JavaScript.

When you click on the 'Spider' tool a dialog will be displayed which allows you to start the spider. You will not be able to spider sites that are not in scope, but the dialog will detect that and give you the option to add the site to the scope.

When the spider is started the tool will show how far the spider has progressed. As the tutorial is very small this will not take very long at all, but it may take much longer for larger sites. The status is maintained when you navigate to different pages so you can carry on exploring the site while the spider is running. You will be able to see all of the pages that the spider has found via the Sites tree. If you click on the Spider tool while it is running then you will be given the option to stop it. You may well see alerts being raised after you start the spider as ZAP passively scans all of the URLs it finds.