ForumCrawler

A ForumCrawler crawls study aboard forums

A Crawler crawls board pages, posts and user info from ordinary forums based on Discuz,
and the data will be stored in MySQL database. It can also crawl specific information like offer information from study aborad forums.
It can be modified to work on some other regular forum web sites.

To run the crawler, please input in console:

python run.py <spider name>

Available spiders:

• forum
• gter

Dependency:

1. python2.7
   
2. scrapy
   
3. bs4(BeautifulSoup4)
   
4. MySQLdb
   
5. pywin32 (For Windows User)
   

Change Log

v0.5

Changes:

• Finish offer_spider, which can crawl offer info from bbs.gter.net
• Improve run.py, choose different LOG_FILE and JOBDIR for different spiders
• Automatically ignore empty offer items

v0.41

Changes:

• Divide settings into 2 parts:
  
  1. General settings in /
     
  2. Custom spider settings in /custom
     
• Modify other components to fit this change

v0.4

Add some utils

Changes:

• Add log_parser
• Add cookies util
• Developing gter.net spider

v0.31

Parse post context(admission info, user background, etc)

Changes:

• Parse post context()
• Parse admission board correctly
• trivial Bugs fixed

v0.3

Finish User page parsing

Changes:

• User page and profile parsing
• from future import unicode_literals
• Fix names of attributes
• Parse board_url and board_name of each post
• log filename relates to time_local()

v0.23

Finish login

Changes:

• Add class variable ‘cookies’, and pass it on to every request

v0.22

Finish forum parser and post parser

Changes:

• Finish parse_post(), PostItem
• Change the name of the project
• MySQL tables use MyISAM engine

v0.21

Use Rule to crawl forum, add forum info into MySQL

Changes: (Only finish forum part)

• Scrape forum info
• Add separate rules with respect to forum, post and user
• Add separate items
• Manage the process of creating tables in settings.py (TABLE_INFO)

v0.2

Only Crawl urls of board, thread and user sites

Changes:

• Replace BeautifulSoup with XPath
• Read cookies from json
• Add Rules in ForumSpider
• Add run.py

v0.1

Crawl all links under the domain.