This is a scraper which will download all AVCX crosswords from the official website.
- You need an active subscription to AVCX.
- You need to have
pipenv
installed. There are installation instructions but it's likely easiest to install with your system package manager (e.g.sudo pacman -S python-pipenv
for Arch orsudo apt-get install pipenv
for Debian).
- Clone this repository:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/mesmere/avcx-scraper.git
cd avcx-scraper
- Run
avcx_scraper.py
with your AVCX credentials:
pipenv run python3 avcx_scraper.py --email=YOUR_EMAIL --password=YOUR_PASSWORD
- Wait for it to complete and then check the
out/
directory to find your files.
Q. Why am I only getting .puz files?
A. avcx-scraper
only downloads files in the AcrossLite format because that's all I care about. Some puzzles (e.g. the trivias) don't have .puz files, so they won't be downloaded. If you want a full backup of everything, it would be trivial to modify the code. 🤷♀️ Seriously, it's one line.
Q. Why are the filenames in this awful scheme that doesn't sort cleanly?
A. Those are the filenames chosen by AVCX themselves via the Content-Disposition header.
Q. Will my account be banned for downloading like a thousand files at once?
A. I don't know, maybe. avcx-scraper
uses very reasonable timeouts and tries to look as much as possible like a normal user, but if anyone is ever looking through the logs it's pretty obvious.