Directv Programming Guide Scraper

Scraping the Latin America DirecTV programming guide by implementing a spider job using Scrapy.

Software Requirements

• Python 2/3
• pip
• Scrapy
• Docker

Setup Instructions

~$ pip install scrapy scrapyd scrapyd-client

Spider Configuration

• TV_CHANNEL_RAGE: set the range of channels to scrape programming info Default value is (130, 600). You can modify this value in directv_spider.py file

Running Locally

~$ scrapy crawl directv -o directv.jl

Deployment

~ $ docker-compose up -d scrapyd
~ $ scrapyd-deploy -p directvscraper # deployed the `eggifyed` project

• You can see default server conf using scrapyd-deploy -l, while deployed spider proyects scrapyd-deploy -L default

• To schedule the spider, run the following:

~ $ curl http://localhost:6800/schedule.json -d project=directvscraper -d spider=directv

• Alternatively you can use the [Directv Programing Guide - Data Cleaning.ipynb](Directv Programing Guide - Data Cleaning.ipynb) notebook to schedule and then clean the scrapped data.

• To check the progress of the spider job, visit http://localhost:6800/jobs

• To cancel the job, you can run the following:

~ $ curl http://localhost:6800/cancel.json -d project=directvscraper -d job=<JOB_ID>

Debugging

If you want to debug specific pages, you can run the following code

~ $ scrapy shell <URL>

More about Scrapyd

More info about the HTTP services available here