gae-livescore

gae-livescore is a Google App Engine application that takes football score details from http://www.livescore.com and makes the data available to clients in JSON format.

It fetches details of current/upcoming matches and stores them in a database and updates the database after a particular time interval. Only matches of whitelisted competitions listed in whitelist database are tracked. This is to keep resource usage in appspot within the daily free quota limits.

Legality

Usage of the application is completely legal. The FAQ of livescore.com (http://www.livescore.com/FAQ.htm) states:

(e-03) Can I copy live score data from your website for my/our own website or other use ?

There is no such law that would prevent you from doing so, live score data can't be copyrighted as any live score data are factual information and not an invention or intellectual work of somebody. With that in mind however, we do have a mechanism in place to detect and block anybody who would try to copy our content by an automated system, being it crawler, spider or any other automated software.

Configuration before deployment

There are a few bits one can configure before deploying the application.

Frequency of updates

Updates are run as cron jobs. Update the cron.yaml appropriately to adjust frequency of updates.

Deployment

Clone Livescore-Api:

$git clone git@github.com:rr0hit/gae-livescore.git

Register your application at appspot.com
Install App Engine Python SDK. (http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html)
Rename the git directory to the application (for eg. MyApp) name you registered:
```
$mv -R gae-livescore MyApp
```

Remove the unwanted files:

$rm -R MyApp/.git README.rst TODO LICENSE

Replace the application name in app.yaml:

$sed  s/gae-livescore/MyApp/ MyApp/app.yaml > MyApp/app.yaml

Deploy the app:
```
$appcfg.py update MyApp
```

Configuration after deployment

1. You have to set the whitelist, consisting of livescore.com page url and competition names. This can be done by logging in as aministrator and filling the form at MyApp.appspot.com/admin where further explaination can be found.

The contents of whitelist database can be viewed/deleted from Appspot dashboard > datastore viewer.

Client End Usage Example in Python

All Mathches query:

>>> from urllib2 import urlopen
>>> import json
>>> html=urlopen("http://MyApp.appspot.com/allmatches")
>>> a=json.load(html)
>>> for m in a:
...     print m['time']+" "+m['home_side']+" "+m['score']+" "+m['away_side']
...
19:45 Bury ? - ? Hartlepool U.
19:45 Macclesfield T. ? - ? Plymouth Argyle
 53' Elfsborg 0 - 0 Falkenbergs FF
19:45 Rochdale ? - ? Notts County
19:45 Morecambe ? - ? Dagenham & R'bridge
19:45 Barnet ? - ? Bradford C.
19:45 Gillingham ? - ? Hereford U.
FT CD Chivas USA 0 - 2 AIK Stockholm
19:45 Oldham Athletic ? - ? Colchester U.
19:45 Swindon T. ? - ? Burton
19:45 Stevenage ? - ? Huddersfield T.
FT San Jose E'quakes 1 - 1 Portland Timbers
19:45 Chesterfield ? - ? Charlton Athletic
19:45 Port Vale ? - ? Crewe Alexandra

"By teams" query:

>>> html=urlopen("http://MyApp.appspot.com/byteams?teams=Burton,Gillingham")
>>> a=json.load(html)
>>> for m in a:
...     print m['time']+" "+m['home_side']+" "+m['score']+" "+m['away_side']
...
19:45 Swindon T. ? - ? Burton
19:45 Gillingham ? - ? Hereford U.

"By Competitions" query:

>>> html=urlopen("http://MyApp.appspot.com/bycompetitions?competitions=England%20-%20League%20Two,England%20-%20League%20One")
>>> a=json.load(html)
>>> for m in a:
...     print m['time']+" "+m['home_side']+" "+m['score']+" "+m['away_side']...
19:45 Morecambe ? - ? Dagenham & R'bridge
19:45 Barnet ? - ? Bradford C.
19:45 Swindon T. ? - ? Burton
19:45 Port Vale ? - ? Crewe Alexandra
19:45 Gillingham ? - ? Hereford U.
19:45 Macclesfield T. ? - ? Plymouth Argyle
19:45 Stevenage ? - ? Huddersfield T.
19:45 Bury ? - ? Hartlepool U.
19:45 Chesterfield ? - ? Charlton Athletic
19:45 Rochdale ? - ? Notts County
19:45 Oldham Athletic ? - ? Colchester U.

The data parsed also contains a few more fields. Each query as seen above consists of an array of dictionaries corresponding to individual matches. Each match dict consists of indices 'home_team', 'away_team', 'score', 'competition', 'time' and 'date' which are strings. There are two additional indices 'finished' and 'live' which are boolean values representing whether match is finished or ongoing.

LICENSE

This software is licensed under GPL v3. See LICENSE file for details.