ShowScraper

This is a collection of a bunch of scrapers which fetch concert listings from various venues in the Bay Area.

It also is a website to view the listings.

Tech Stack

The scraper uses headless Selenium (Chromedriver) and is written in Ruby.

Results are converted to JSON and pushed to a Google Cloud Storage bucket.

The front end is written in React and styled with Bulma CSS framework.

Setup - Scraper

1. Run bundle install in the root of the repo using a stable Ruby version

2. You're gonna need to install Chromedriver.

   • On Raspberry Pi: you can do this with sudo apt-get install chromium-chromedriver and this will happen automatically (the scraper will check your system architecture and use the right chromedriver path)
   • on OSX and Windows you can find all versions at https://chromedriver.chromium.org/ and then add it to your PATH. For example, add this to your ~/.bash_profile:

     export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/folder/containing/chromedriver/
     

3. Run cp .env.example .env in the root of the repo. The .env file sets environment variables which can be used to customize the application's behavior. This file can be edited directly.

4. Make a new "project" on google cloud. Create a GCS bucket in the project. Add the credentials to .env:

   STORAGE_PROJECT = "my-project-id"
   STORAGE_CREDENTIALS = "path/to/keyfile.json"
   

5. Change the GCS bucket permissions so all files are publicly available by default.

6. Configure gsutils to use your new project, then upload the CORS file which I've included in the repo:

   gsutil cors set cors-json-file.json gs://<BUCKET_NAME>
   

Setup - Frontend

1. Make sure you're using a stable Node version
2. cd frontend/react-app
3. run yarn install to get dependencies
4. yarn start and then open localhost:3000

To build the project for production, use yarn build

Note: There is also a script which you can run from the root of the repo to start the react server:

bin/run_frontend

This runs nvm use 14; cd frontend/react_app && yarn install & yarn start

Note you will probably have to change this nvm use 14 if you are using a different Node version.

Running Scraper

There is a command line tool at bin/run_scraper. By default it will run all scrapers (each will fetch a maximum of 200 events) and then upload the results to GCS.

Options (note that most of these can also be set from .env)

# Limits each scraper to N results
--limit=10

# Just print the results, don't upload them to GCS
--skip-persist

# Don't rescue scraping errors - one broken scraper will stop the whole script
# If rescue=true (the default) then broken scrapers will just be skipped
--rescue=false

# Just update the list of venues. Don't actually scrape any events.
--no-scrape

# Limit the scrape to a set of venues. Comma-separated list.
--sources=GreyArea,Cornerstone

# Run headlessly, or not
--headless=true
--headless=false

For example, combining options:

bin/run-scraper --headless=true --limit=5 --skip-persist --rescue=false sources=ElboRoom,Knockout

There are some other configuration options done through ENV, see .env.example

Note that every time you run a scraper, it will completely overwrite the list of events for that venue.

Testing

There are some basic automated tests for the scrapers. Run bundle exec rspec from the root of the repo. Using rspec you can also isolate certain tests to run (left as an exercise to the reader).

Adding a new scraper

1. Add a new entry to sources.json. You can get latlng from Google Maps (right click the marker on the map and the coords will pop up). For desc you can just copy the blurb from Google Maps as well.

2. Create a new file scraper/lib/sources/venue_name.rb (replacing venue_name, obviously).

3. You can copy one of the existing scraper classes as a starting point. Note that there are a few different types of websites (calendar view, infinite scroll, all-on-one-page) so it's best to find another scraper that is similar in that regard.

4. Make sure the class name is the exact same as the name value in sources.json

5. Fill out the contents of the scraper, using binding.pry and the HEADLESS=false environment variable as needed for debugging.

6. Add a test case to scraper_spec.rb (can just use generic_run_test like the other scrapers)

Note, there is no need to explicitly require the scraper class anywhere into the codebase. Autoloading is already set up based on sources.json.

A note about the unused/server and unused/db folders

These are both unused. I kept them here in case I want to have a dedicated backend at some point.

For now it suffices to go backend-less and just host the results on GCS.

Development - TODOS

• Map View
• Add more meta-scrapers (e.g. scrape other scrapers/aggregators), especially for electronic shows which aren't really captured by the current venue list or "The List"
• Add more venues (have specifically received requests for South Bay, but probably there are new SF / East Bay venues as well).
• Add Venue Events List view (accessible from Venue List View)
• Find a way to handle events that don't have an explicit year in their date
• Add Submit Event / About pages