Yahoo! Fantasy Sports API Exploration
To use the code in this repo, you will need to have a valid Yahoo! Fantasy Sports account and be participating in a league. This code is meant for the Yahoo! Fantasy Hockey, but could probably be adapted easily to the other sports. All of the code here is written in Python. There are several Python dependancies which you will need to have installed:
This is a great library for handling the web requests to Yahoo! using OAuth. It also handles the initialization of your credentials (access and refresh tokens, etc.). Check the link above for more details on how to initialize. In summary, you will need to create a JSON file that contains the following information:
{
"consumer_key": "my_very_long_and_weird_consumer_key",
"consumer_secret": "my_not_that_long_consumer_secret"
}
And reference it by location in the from_file argument to the OAuth2(...) call (see main.py). The consumer_key and consumer_secret can be generated by going to the Create Application page here. You will need to sign into your account to generate it. Make sure to choose Installed Application, and to give permissions to Fantasy Sports, the rest is not required.
Once you have initialized your oauth.json file, the first time you run main.py or main_players.py (either uses the yahoo_oauth), you will trigger the redirect which takes to Yahoo where you enter your login credentials. After doing so, your JSON file will be updated with the access token and refresh token, and whatever else it needs to make requests seemlessly with the Yahoo API.
The data store used throughout these scripts is Redis. Visit the redis page for more information on how to get a redis server running on your local machine. It will need to be running in order to execute the scripts in this repo.
These libraries are all used together to perform visualizations. Check out their pages linked above for more info on each.
There are two types of scripts in this repo: data collection, and data visualization. Currently, the main.py script is meant to collect league and team data, while the main_players.py script is meant for collecting player data. The two visualization scripts are rankplot.py and opponant_pivot.py.
This is a class defined for getting and parsing resources from the Yahoo! API. It contains a set of methods, one for each API of interest.
When initializing the yahoo_api object in scripts, you need to provide a league_id and game_key. I have stored these in another JSON file called league_info.json, an example of which is already in this repo. You can find your league key in the League Settings page on the main Yahoo Fantasy Sports website. The game_key for NHL will just be "nhl".
Notice the visualization scripts usually have a plt.show() or plt.savefig() call at the end. These calls will display the figure on screen, or save it to disk, respectively. If the plotting libraries give you trouble, make sure to check their documentation to ensure you have installed them correctly.