News crawler for VnExpress and TuoiTre.vn

Description

Crawl news from vnexpress.net and tuoitre.vn and rank them by total likes in their comments.

Functionality

VnExpress crawler: Crawl articles from VnExpress.net, rank them by comment's likes and store results in database.
TuoiTre crawler: Crawl articles from TuoiTre.vn, rank them by comment's likes and store results in database.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

A running Postgres instance.
Require Python 3.10 and above.
- pipenv for ensuring consistent packages and Python version and asdf or pyenv for switching between Python versions.
- (Alternatively) Docker image with appropriate Python version can also be used.

Installation

Clone and go to this repository:

git clone git@github.com:pmphan/news-crawler.git
cd news-crawler

Preparing the Python environment:
- With pipenv and asdf/pyenv. Note pipenv might prompt to install appropriate Python version if not present on system:
```
pipenv install --python 3.10 --deploy --ignore-pipfile
```
- (Or) Build the Python image with Docker:
```
docker build -t crawler:latest .
```

Set up Postgres database.

docker-compose.yml file configures postgres and pgadmin by default. docker-compose up -d for quick set up.

Create an .env file and populate it with an existing postgres instance:

# These are default settings even if not set.
POSTGRES_DB=postgres
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
POSTGRES_HOST=localhost
POSTGRES_PORT=5432
# Or, overwritting all above
POSTGRES_URI=postgresql+asyncpg://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/postgres

Run scrapy crawler (days_ago=DATE determines article's published time from which crawler will crawl):
- With pipenv:
```
pipenv run scrapy crawl [vnexpress|tuoitre] [-a days_ago=DATE] [--logfile FILE] [--loglevel LEVEL]
```
- With prebuilt Docker image:
```
docker run -t --env-file .env [--name container_name] [--network network_name] crawler (vnexpress|tuoitre) [-a days_ago=DATE] [--loglevel LEVEL] [&> LOGFILE]
```
  Note on network argument:
  - If .env use POSTGRES_HOST=localhost, network has to be host, unless Postgres is configured on the same container.
  - If Postgres instance is not connected via loopback interface (e.g. POSTGRES_HOST=192.168/16 or remote IP) setting network argument is not neccessary.
  - When setting up Postgres instance with given docker-compose.yml, network could be set to news-crawler_default (default naming scheme of bridge network created by Docker Compose is foldername_default, so change it if your folder name is different, list of networks can be inspected with docker network ls), and .env can use POSTGRES_HOST=postgres.

Connect to Postgres instance to read result, or use script (Postgres credentials must be pre-supplied in .env or default will be used):

With pipenv:

pipenv run python read_result.py [-h] [-o OUTPUT] SITENAME

With Docker image: