cewl
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CeWL is a Ruby app that spiders a given URL to a specified depth and returns a list of words for use with password crackers.
Summary
cewl is an open-source command-line tool, free to use, that spiders a target website to a specified depth and builds a custom word list from the text it finds, intended for password crackers such as John the Ripper. It runs as a Ruby script or Docker container, with options to restrict or extend crawling beyond the original site, filter word length, and write results to a file for scripting into a larger cracking workflow. This puts it in the hands of penetration testers and red teamers building targeted wordlists rather than relying on generic dictionaries, and it sits in the password-cracking space as a wordlist-generation step that feeds tools rather than doing any cracking itself. First committed in 2016 and still maintained by 21 contributors, with 26 commits in the past year though its last formal release was over two years ago.
CeWL is a Ruby app that spiders a given URL to a specified depth and returns a list of words for use with password crackers.
How cewl helps
What words would a target's own site suggest for cracking their passwords?
crawls the specified site and pulls the visible text into a deduplicated list of words, giving crackers a wordlist grounded in the target's own language rather than a generic dictionary
Are the words on this site enough, or should the search reach related domains too?
can be told to follow links off the original site rather than staying confined to it, pulling in text from linked domains as well
Which short, common words are cluttering a wordlist meant for guessing passwords?
filters out words below a chosen length so the list keeps only words long enough to be plausible passwords
Do case and accented characters matter to the passwords being guessed?
can normalise everything to lower case and convert accented letters like umlauts to their plain equivalents, collapsing variants that would otherwise be counted as different words
Are there names or authors tied to a target's documents worth adding to a wordlist?
uses the companion tool to pull metadata such as author and creator names out of already-downloaded files, extending the word list beyond page text
Should numbers seen on the site be treated as part of the words themselves?
can append digits found alongside words so the list includes number-bearing variants rather than stripping them out
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for cewl, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail cewl puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
1 entry
No entries match these filters.
- July 20161
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in digininja/CeWL, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 3 +3 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 2 +2 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 3 years first maintainer reply 0 hours
- Open backlog 4 of 69 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 4
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 2,836
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Articles
1 article · updated Nov 4, 2026Where cewl turns up in what others publish: how-tos, attack reports that name it, and incident write-ups. A row says why it is here and quotes where the article names it; the link goes to the publisher.
Tutorials & guides 1
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A Detailed Guide on Cewl
In this article, we are going to focus on the Kali Linux tool “Cewl” which will basically help you to create a wordlist.
2 more quotes
Table of Contents Introduction to Cewl Default Procedure Store this wordlist in a file Generating a Wordlist of a certain length Retrieval of Emails from the website.
It also has an associated command-line app FAB, which uses the same metadata extraction techniques to generate author/producer lists from already downloaded files using information extraction algorithms like CeWL.
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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