Price Tracker Web App

This project started as a simple web scraper and has evloved into a price tracking webapp that will create and display an historical price history for a desired item. The webapp portion of this project is being built using the Python Django lib. Thes supporting scripts and files are present in the price_tracker dir. Within this dir there is an app named "trackerapp". This is where the database, files, and scripts for the webapp are.

Once complete the webapp will allow you to enter the url of an item you would like to track, and return todays average, along with any price history that may be present.

Requirements and Installation Instructions

This project is built in python 3.8.3 using the Django 3.2.7 lib. The install instructions are written for a Linux based OS such as Ubuntu.

Installation:

Clone repository to desired location, which will create a folder named Price-Tracker-Web-App. In this folder are the main python scripts that parse the data as well as the folders created by Django.

Open terminal and use pip to install all of the required packages

pip install -r requirements.txt

Move to the price_tracker dir and run the following:

python3 manage.py migrate

These commands will allow the forms and database to be used. Next you will need to create a superuser

python3 manage.py createsuperuser

Follow the prompt to finish creating your superuser. You will need this info to access the admin page

Finally all you need to do is start the server. Run the following:

python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

The server and webapp are now up and running and can be accessed by entering the host computers IP address adding :8000 to the end.

Usage

ebayscraper.py

The main script ebayscraper.py takes in an ebay item search url as a command line argument. It then calculates the average item price that day. Results are saved or amended (if exists) to a CSV file.

$ python3 ebayscraper.py https://www.ebay.com/<search_url>

pricechartgenerator.py

The pricechartgenerator.py script takes in the info from the csv file and creates a simple line graph to show the change in price over time.

$ python3 pricechartgenerator.py <csv_file>

post_data.py

The post_data.py script converts the CSV file to JSON and uploads that data to the web app's database

python3 post_data.py

TODO

test_file.py

The Test_File.py file will test each module in each of the scripts for future troubleshooting and debugging.

test_file.py

The Test_File.py file will test each module in each of the scripts for future troubleshooting and debugging.