MUGAlyser

Version "1.0.6a6"

MUGAlyser is a python program that uses the Meetup API to extract longitudinal data from the Meetup website for a collection of meetup groups. It's designed to capture MongoDB meetup information but it could be used to collect data on any group of meetups by changing the list of urlnames in the mugs.py file. You can also get specific mugs using the --mug parameter.

It puts the data in a MongoDB database. There are separate collections for groups, members, past events and upcoming events.

There is also an audit collection which tracks when the data was collected. Each record is associated with a Batch ID which is tracked in the audit collection.

This is beta software and is currently a WIP. It may break at any time.

The bin directory contains the most interesting programs for end users.

bin/mugalyser_main.py

Captures data from meetup via the Meetup API. For this program to work you need to provide a meetup api key . Without this key the program will fail. The key can be passed in via the --apikey argument. Most people find it easier to set an environment variable MEETUP_API_KEY which the program will also use.

The meetup API is rate limited and the program is smart about the rate limit so you shouldn't see issues unless you run more than one copy at a time.

It currently takes about 17 minutes to capture a complete batch of meetup data for the MongoDB user groups (of which there at 116 with over 50k members in total).

The mugalyser can use the Meetup Pro API calls if you have a pro account. You can ask the MUAlyser to use pro or no pro accounts using the --collect argument. The options are pro, nopro and all. The default is all.

The list of MUGs to process is read from a file using the --urlfile parameter. There is a default list of pro accounts in ../etc/mongodb_pro_groups.

By default the data is written to the MUGS database. To change this default specify a different database via the MongoDB URI passed to the --host argument.

bin/makeapikeyfile.py

This creates a file callled apikey.py which contains the API key for the application. The API key can be passed in on the command line or read from MEETUP_API_KEY. apikey.py is not checked into github to prevent they key from being compromised.