Bangladeshi Online Newspaper Crawler

Done

[Note: Dhaka Tribune website is under development so that crawler won’t work]

• en.prothom-alo.com
• thedailystar.net
• dhakatribune.com

How to

0. Before Beginning

1. Download and Install MongoDB

2. Download Stanford NER and configure it

3. Download and configure Elasticsearch & Kibana

1. Setting Up

1 (a) If you use a linux distro, install these packages first

Using this command,

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf libtool pkg-config python-opengl python-imaging python-pyrex python-pyside.qtopengl idle-python2.7 qt4-dev-tools qt4-designer libqtgui4 libqtcore4 libqt4-xml libqt4-test libqt4-script libqt4-network libqt4-dbus python-qt4 python-qt4-gl libgle3 python-dev

sudo easy_install greenlet

sudo easy_install gevent

1 (b) Cloning the repository and creating virtual environment

Cloning

Open a cmd or terminal and enter the following command

git clone -b spider_only https://github.com/manashmndl/NewsCrawler.git

After a successful clone this will be shown

Cloning into 'NewsCrawler'...
remote: Counting objects: 711, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (7/7), done.
remote: Total 711 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 704
Receiving objects: 100% (711/711), 2.03 MiB | 78.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (376/376), done.
Checking connectivity... done.

Virtual Environment Creation

• Enter the directory using cd command,

cd NewsCrawler

• Create a virtual environment

[I’m using Python 2.7, not anaconda]

virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 venv

Successful prompt,

Running virtualenv with interpreter /usr/bin/python2.7
New python executable in /home/<username>/Downloads/project/NewsCrawler/venv/bin/python2.7
Also creating executable in /home/<username>/Downloads/project/NewsCrawler/venv/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.

• Activate the environment

source venv/bin/activate

On successful execution, the environment will be visible

(venv) rubel@rubel-rig ~/Downloads/project/NewsCrawler $ 

1 (c) Installing Dependencies

After activating the virtual environment, enter the following command to install all dependencies,

pip install -r requirements.txt

1 (d) Checking if the spiders are ready or not

Enter the following command,

scrapy list

If it echoes these two spiders then the spiders are ready to crawl! Turn on the MongoDB, Elasticsearch & Kibana Server and start crawling.

dailystar
prothomalo

2. Configuring API and StanfordNER Path

Indicoio API Configuration

At credentials_and_configs/keys.py file, change the API key. You can create an account here and get your own API Key.

Example,

INDICOIO_API_KEY = '8ee6432e7dc137740c40c0af8d7XXXXXX' # Replace the value with your own API Key

StanfordNER Path

At credentials_and_configs/stanford_ner_path.py file, change the paths according to the downloaded NER and CLASSIFIER paths.

Example,

STANFORD_NER_PATH = 'C:\StanfordParser\stanford-ner-2015-12-09\stanford-ner.jar' #Insert your path here
STANFORD_CLASSIFIER_PATH = 'C:\StanfordParser\stanford-ner-2015-12-09\classifiers\english.all.3class.distsim.crf.ser.gz' # Insert your path here

3. Running the spiders

Open a command window / terminal at the root of the folder. Run the following commands to start scraping.

4. Crawling Instructions

Spider Names

• The Daily Star -> dailystar
• Prothom Alo -> prothomalo
• Dhaka Tribune -> dhakatribune

Crawl ‘em all

For Daily Star

scrapy crawl dailystar

For Prothom Alo

scrapy crawl prothomalo

For Dhaka Tribune

scrapy crawl dhakatribune

Crawling bounded by date time

If I want to scrape all of the news between 1st January 2016 and 1st February 2016 my command will look like this,

Daily Star

scrapy crawl dailystar -a start_date="01-01-2016" -a  end_date="01-02-2016"

Prothom Alo

scrapy crawl prothomalo -a start_date="01-01-2016" -a  end_date="01-02-2016"

Crawling Dhaka Tribune by page range

Dhaka Tribune

scrapy crawl dhakatribune -a start_page=0 -a end_page=10

Crawling with CSV/JSON output

If you want to collect all crawled data in a csv or a json file you can run this command.

Daily Star [csv output]

scrapy crawl dailystar -a start_date="01-01-2016" -a end_date="01-02-2016" -o output_file_name.csv

Daily Star [json output]

scrapy crawl dailystar -a start_date="01-01-2016" -a end_date="01-02-2016" -o output_file_name.json

Dhaka Tribune [csv output]

scrapy crawl dhakatribune -a start_page=0 -a end_page=10 -o output_file_name.csv

Dhaka Tribune [json output]

scrapy crawl dhakatribune -a start_page=0 -a end_page=10 -o output_file_name.json

Prothom Alo [csv output]

scrapy crawl prothomalo -a start_date="01-01-2016" -a end_date="01-02-2016" -o output_file_name.csv

Prothom Alo [json output]

scrapy crawl prothomalo -a start_date="01-01-2016" -a end_date="01-02-2016" -o output_file_name.json

5. Data insertion into Elasticsearch and Kibana Visualization Instructions

• Download and extract Kibana and Elasticsearch

Starting MongoDB Service

• Open CMD/Terminal then type the following command

mongod 

It should give the following output

2016-12-03T03:00:38.986+0600 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=7204 port=27017 dbpath=C:\data\db\ 64-bit host=DESKTOP-4PR51E6
2016-12-03T03:00:38.986+0600 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] targetMinOS: Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2
2016-12-03T03:00:38.987+0600 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] db version v3.2.7
.............
.............
2016-12-03T03:00:39.543+0600 I NETWORK  [HostnameCanonicalizationWorker] Starting hostname canonicalization worker
2016-12-03T03:00:39.543+0600 I FTDC     [initandlisten] Initializing full-time diagnostic data capture with directory 'C:/data/db/diagnostic.data'
2016-12-03T03:00:39.558+0600 I NETWORK  [initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017

Now you’re all set to use the MongoDB service!

MongoDB Troubleshooting

• Couldn’t find the path

Add the MongoDB\Server\3.2\bin folder to your system path and then try again.

• Data directory C:\data\db\ not found., terminating

Quite simple, all you need to do is to create a db folder there and you’re good to go.

Starting Elasticsearch Server

Go to elasticsearch-5.0.0\bin folder then run the program elasticsearch.bat on windows.

Starting Kibana Server

Go to kibana-5.0.0-windows-x86\bin folder and run the program kibana.bat on windows.

All of your local server and services should be working properly. Start crawling using the scrapy crawl command and the data will be automatically inserted to mongo database, elasticsearch, and you can get the output as either csv or json format. You must start elasticsearch before kibana

Configuring Kibana for data acquisition and Visualization

Kibana server will listen to localhost:5601 by default. So open the url in your browser.

• Go to Management

• Click on Index Patterns and then Add New

• Remove tick from Index contains time-based events and write news* on the Index name or pattern text input. Then click Create

• Then go to Discover and select news* index