I'm trying to get started with Storm-crawler but am a bit confused when it comes to Maven, not too familiar with Maven. Do I just simply clone the github repo for Storm-crawler, cd into that and then run mvn clean install?
OR do I mkdir storm-crawler, cd into that and run all those maven commands that are on the stormcrawler.net getting-started page? Will maven download everything I need and after that how do I run Storm-crawler.
Storm-crawler looks really cool, but Maven is brand new to me... (I'm familiar with npm - and they keep it simple!)
Unless you want to use the latest code which has not yet been released, there is no need to build SC. Just run the archetype command and it will build a proto project for you which will have the StormCrawler dependencies already configured. Maven will download everything indeed. Look at the README that will be in the generated project for instructions on how to run it.
What you described in the first paragraph is how to compile SC itself, which shouldn't be needed. The latest version will be downloaded by Maven.
See WIKI for a list of tutorial and resources