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Flask Scrapper

This is a flask based web scrapper for the ITJobsWatch website.


Note: This project was developed and deployed on Ubuntu 20

Features

  • One click app trigger
  • Clearly formatted table results
  • Login and Registration System
  • Light weight Database with SQLite3
  • SHA256 password encryption
  • Easily deployed
  • Easily modifiable with templates
  • Outputs a JSON file
  • Ease of implementation to other languages
  • Functional API
  • Functional user panel with GUI access to the API

Pre-requisites

Essential Packages:

Optional Modules:

  • Nginx (For reverse proxy)
  • Gunicorn (For production deployment)
  • Supervisor (For automating deployment)

TLDR

Automated shell file available HERE.

  • Open terminal
  • Install SQLite3
    • sudo apt install sqlite3
  • Activate a fresh Python virtual environment
    • python3 -m venv <venv_name>
    • source <venv_name>/bin/activate
  • Navigate to the folder where you have cloned this repository
  • cd deploy_code
  • export PYTHONPATH=$PWD/project/
  • python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
  • python3 setup.py build
  • python3 setup.py install
  • python3 create_db.py
  • export FLASK_APP=project
  • flask run
  • Open browser
  • Navigate to http://localhost:5000

Building the project

Before installing any dependencies we need to ensure we add our project into our python path. To do that run export PYTHONPATH=$PWD/project/ in your shell. This will ensure that all the files are discoverable and available to our python interpreter.


Building the project requires 3 simple steps, installing the requirements.txt and building and installing the setup.py file. All the requirements and dependencies will be installed with python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt followed by python3 setup.py build and python3 setup.py install. We also need to ensure we have SQLite3 installed, to do that run sudo apt install sqlite3 which will install the package. And to initialise the database run python3 create_db.py.

Running the project

After installing all the packages, we need to ensure we set the FLASK_APP variable to project as an environment variable. To do that we simply run export FLASK_APP=project. After setting our environment, all we need to do is run flask run and open our browser. Once our browser is open navigate to http://localhost:5000 and that is everything.

Production Deployment

For production deployment you can use gunicorn or any other recommended package from Flask's website. To install simply activate your virtual environment in python and run python3 -m pip install gunicorn and to run your app just use gunicorn project:app.


For a more automated system, you can use supervisor to turn our application into a service which whill be enabled when our system is started. To install it run sudo apt install supervisor. Afterwards we need to copy a config file provided in the config_files folder in this repo called flask_app.conf into /etc/supervisor/conf.d/. After we have copied our config file we need to run the following commands:

  • sudo supervisorctl reread
  • sudo supervisorctl update
  • sudo supervisorctl avail
  • sudo supervisorctl restart FlaskApp

Our application should now be deployed as a service. Log files should be saved in the ../deploy_code/project/var/log/ folder.


We can also deploy our application with NGinx, for that we need to install it with sudo apt install nginx. Edit the configuration file at server_name with our public IP address, and copy that config file to /etc/nginx/ folder. Afterwards use sudo systemctl restart nginx and we should have a running reverse proxy which redirects all trafic to our web-application.

Ansible Automation

This repo also contains Ansible-Ready files to fully deploy the Flask application. scrapper_playbook.yaml will deploy the Flask application on the specified machine into production, therefore running ansible-playbook scrapper_playbook.yaml will take care of the entire provisioning of your machine. Please ensure that you add scrapper group to your hosts file, located in /etc/ansible/hosts.


Example:

[scrapper]
192.168.0.1 ansible_connection=ssh ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/path/to/file/key.pem