Funder scrapers

A collection of scrapers for gathering data from grant funders, intended to be used in the Beehive funding platform.

Written using python3 and scrapy

Install

1. Clone into new directory git clone https://github.com/TechforgoodCAST/beehive-scrapers.git
2. Setup virtual environment python3 venv env
3. Enter virtual environment source env\bin\activate (linux) or env\Scripts\activate (windows)
4. Install requirements pip install -r requirements.txt
5. (Windows only) install pypiwin32: pip install pypiwin32

Write a new spider

Run the command:

scrapy genspider -t fund_spider fundname "fundurl.com/path-to-fund-list"

Where:

• fundname is the name of the funder (all lowercase, no spaces or special characters)
• "fundurl.com/path-to-fund-list" should be the URL of the fund list page.

This will generate a skeleton scraper with the capability to:

• go through a fund list page
• generate titles and links for each fund
• go to a particular fund page and get more details
• go to the next page if the fund list is on more than one page

You'll need to adjust the css selectors depending on the exact structure of the list page.

Run a spider

Comic relief

To output funds found to a funds.jl JSON lines file run: scrapy crawl comicrelief -o funds.jl

Run all spiders

To run all spiders use the following command:

python funderscrapers/crawl_all.py

You can also use crawl_all.bat in Windows or ./crawl_all.sh in Bash.