RedditScrapeNSFW

With the news that reddit will soon be charging for API access, and that imgur is no longer hosting NSFW media, I wanted to create something to help download things while the getting is good. I've tested this on Mac and Ubuntu with python 3.9.7

The code is designed to run in a concurrent fashion (sort of like multi-threading) to help with performance.

It will also look to see if the file already exists before downloading it, so you can run this multiple times.

Lastly, it seems to be working with imgur, redgif, and gfycat.

Getting Started

The following sections should help get you started.

Setup Reddit API

Visit this link to create an app

At the bottom you should see a button to create an app, click on it and fill in the details so it looks something like this:

Once you click on the create app button again, you should see it displayed above. Click on the edit link in the bottom left corner to get the details you need. You should see something like this:

The box in green represents your "Client ID" The box in red represents your "Client Secret"

DO NOT SHARE THESE WITH ANYONE ELSE

Install libmagic

This is used by the code to analyze if files are text or not (some sites return text files). If they are text, it grabs the proper URL from within the text and downloads that instead.

On a mac, you just need to do brew install libmagic (assuming you already have homebrew installed).

Setup the Script

Clone the repo
cd into the repo folder
rename subs.sample to subs and modify accordingly. Make sure you enter each sub-reddit you want to download on its own line, and this IS CaSE SEnsITive
rename config.sample to config
Edit the file config with your values
Install the required python modules: python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Configure the Script

I use the file config to control all of the important variables. Below are some of the things you need to understand and adjust to your own liking.

Performance Considerations

I've got this setup to run on a fairly beefy VM (24 cores and 20 gigs of ram). Consider modifying the two values in config:

MAX_WORKERS
POOL_SIZE

These values should be more in line with how many CPU cores you have (as a very rough estimate). You can try tweaking these, but putting them too high can kill your system or introduce lots of errors. There is a trade off here, so higher numbers isn't always better.

Sorting Posts

I am using the praw module to generate the list of files to download. There are 3 settings in your config file that matter here:

REDDIT_SORT_METHOD
REDDIT_TIME_PERIOD
REDDIT_POST_LIMIT

The default settings give you the first 100 top posts from all time

Here is a list of possible sorting options for subreddit posts in PRAW:

hot: The most popular posts, taking both upvotes and downvotes into account.
new:The most recently submitted posts.
rising: Posts that are quickly gaining upvotes and comments.
controversial: Posts with a high number of both upvotes and downvotes.
top: The highest-scoring (upvotes minus downvotes) posts of all time, or within a specified time range.

For top and controversial, you can also specify a time filter with the following options:

all - All time.
year - Within the past year.
month - Within the past month.
week - Within the past week.
day - Within the past day.
hour - Within the past hour.

Running the script

Make sure you are in the same folder as the script and try running python crawler.py.

Eventually a progress indicator will show up and you'll notice it's not very accurate. Due to the multi-threaded nature of this I couldn't figure out a way to get a reliable count. Basically it starts downloading files while it's still discovering just how many files it has to download. Eventually it should settle down some and give a more accurate reading.

If things work, the script will create a sub-folder for each sub-reddit inside of whatever folder you specified as MEDIA_FOLDER in your config file.

If any of the entries in your list of subs don't exist (You spelled them wrong etc) it will let you know at the end: List of bad subs: ['SomeSubThatDoesn'tExist']

Results can be seen in output_log.txt once it finishes.

Running in the background

If you want to make sure this keeps running in case you get disconnected or something, you can run it in the background with something like nohup python crawler.py > nohup.log &. You can monitor the status of this using jobs and use kill %1 if you need to cancel it.

Stopping the script

IMPORTANT: This script runs in a threaded manner so you can't just ctrl+c your way out. If you want to cancel this you'll have to use ctrl+z first, then once it has stopped you can run kill %1.

Downloading your own saved items

I've created saved.py for people who want to run this against their own saved items. It will require you add your reddit username and password to the config file. Once you do that, just run python saved.py and it should work in a similar fashion, just slower (no threading here). It looks for anything in your saved items that points to imgur, redgif, or gyfcat and puts them in the same folder structure as the other stuff.

There's also a config setting (REDDIT_SAVED_LIMIT) for how many of your saved items it should retrieve, defaults to 500.

To Do

A few things I'd like to do if time permits....

Use something like sqllite to store all of this, that opens up some possibilities down the road for easier storing/tagging/classification.
Implement proper logging
Look into making this asynchronous to increase performance: (This is done)

PatrickBriggs/RedditScrape