README.md

EG Scraper

DEPRECATED.

See https://github.com/CLSPhila/django-docketsearch for a replacement.

A simple REST API for using a headless browser to collect docket information from the Pennsylvania Courts.

Using the API, if you've got it running already

See openapi.yaml for full details.

More briefly, there are two endpoints: /searchName/[MDJ or CP] and /lookupDocket/[MDJ or CP].

POST your request to one of these two endpoints. Requests should be json objects.

/searchName/[MDJ or CP] will search for a specific person's name. The request should look like:

{
  first_name: John,
  last_name: Smith,
  dob: 01/01/1776
}

A POST request to /lookupDocket/[MDJ or CP] will look up docket information about a specific docket:

{
  docket_number: CP-12-CR-1234567
}

Responses will also be json objects. A search for a single docket will return an object looking like:

{
  status: [success or failure]
  docket: [a docket object]
}

And a search by name will return

{
  status: [success or failure]
  dockets: [an array of docket objects]
}

A docket object looks like this:

{
  "docket_number": "CP-46-CR-0006239-2015",
  "docket_sheet_url": [a long url],
  "summary_url": [a long url],
  "caption": "Comm. v. Kane, Kathleen Granahan",
  "case_status": "Closed",
  "otn": "T6863802",
}

Error handling is not implemented thoroughly, so if your search fails, responses may not provide fantastic error messages.

Building for Development

Build the container, and mount the project's code into the running container.

Use the docker-compose file, dev-compose.

docker-compose -f dev-compose up

To tty connect to it:

First get the container running with

docker-compose -f dev-compose up

Then in another terminal: docker-compose -f dev-compose exec api /bin/bash

To run tests

exec runs a command, pytest in the service api. -w sets the working directory of the command, /app.

docker-compose -f dev-compose up
docker-compose -f dev-compose exec api pytest /app

Apache Bench

This app is really slow, so its necessary to test out its performance, even for tiny numbers of users. I've used apache Bench for this.

Try making multiple concurrent requests to the app by starting it in a container and running ab against it.

docker-compose -f dev-compose up
ab -p post_data.txt -T application/json -n 3 -c 3  http://localhost:8800

Other development resources

[https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/getting-started.html#simple-usage](selenium-python bindings)

Building for Production

Note that is Github integration is set up, Dockerhub will automatically build the image based on the master branch, and tag it with :latest.

Build the container

sudo docker build -t egscraper:v0.0.1 .

And run it

sudo docker run egscraper