web-monitoring-processing

A component of the EDGI Web Monitoring Project.

Overview of this component's tasks

This component is intended to hold various backend tools serving different tasks:

1. Query external sources of captured web pages (e.g. Internet Archive, Page Freezer, Sentry), and formulate a request for importing their version and page metadata into web-monitoring-db.
2. Provide a web service that computes the "diff" between two versions of a page in response to a query from web-monitoring-db.
3. Query web-monitoring-db for new Changes, analyze them in an automated pipeline to assign priority and/or filter out uninteresting ones, and submit this information back to web-monitoring-db.

Development status

Working and Under Active Development:

• A Python API to PageFreezer's diffing service in web_monitoring.page_freezer
• A Python API to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine's archived webpage snapshots in web_monitoring.internetarchive
• A Python API to the web-monitoring-db Rails app in web_monitoring.db
• Python functions and a command-line tool for importing snapshots from PF and IA into web-monitoring-db.

Legacy projects that may be revisited:

• Example HTML providing useful test cases.

Installation Instructions

1. Get Python 3.6. This packages makes use of modern Python features and requires Python 3.6+. If you don't have Python 3.6, we recommend using conda to install it. (You don't need admin privileges to install or use it, and it won't interfere with any other installations of Python already on your system.)

2. Install the package.

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   python setup.py develop

3. Copy the script .env.example to .env and supply any local configuration info you need. (Only some of the package's functionality requires this.) Apply the configuration:

   source .env

4. See module comments and docstrings for more usage information. Also see the command line tool wm, which is installed with the package. For help, use

   wm --help

5. To run the tests or build the documentation, first install the development requirements.

   pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

6. To build the docs:

   cd docs
   make html

7. To run the tests:

   python run_tests.py

   Any additional arguments are passed through to py.test.

Docker

The Dockerfile runs wm-diffing-server on port 80 in the container. To build and run:

docker build -t processing .
docker run -p 4000:80 processing

Point your browser or curl at http://localhost:4000.