CourseCake

From developing a course planner to simply finding in-person classes, there's an easier, responsible, and more powerful way to get your university's course information.

We aim to create an API to access course data, where each college's course is unified under one schema. By making course data easier to responsibly access and more "edible" for programs, we hope CourseCake gives a smooth approach to build useful tools for students.

There are two main features to CourseCake to accomplish this goal:

• RESTful API coursecake.tisuela.com/api/v1 - docs
• Installable Scraper package - docs

UC Irvine -- Zot your courses easier and responsibly

Currently the only supported school in CourseCake, the motivation of CourseCake is to make it easier to develop tools like AntPlanner and Antscoper, and promote a responsible use of WebSoc by not abusing its resources.

All of the latest scraped data is stored in a local database, which avoids congesting WebSoc and allows successful requests even when WebSoc is down.

Endpoints that do directly query WebSoc are ratelimited and follow usage rates similar to other UCI Irvine course helper wesbites.

What is a Course?

Here is an example response using one of our courses endpoints. Full documentation available here. The response is a dictionary containing a list of course objects. The schema of a course is shown in this example.

{
  "courses": [
    {
      "building": "string",
      "code": "string",
      "department": "string",
      "departmentTitle": "string",
      "enrolled": 0,
      "instructor": "string",
      "location": "string",
      "max": 0,
      "name": "string",
      "requested": 0,
      "restrictions": "string",
      "room": "string",
      "school": "string",
      "status": "string",
      "time": "string",
      "title": "string",
      "type": "string",
      "units": 0,
      "updated": "datetime: string,null",
      "waitlisted": 0
    }
  ]
}

Documentation

RESTful API

Scrapers

Installation

Clone repository

git clone https://github.com/nananananate/CourseScraper

Create Python virtual environment

There are a good amount of depencies for this project -- it will be good practice to use a virtual environment, albeit not necessary.

On macOS and Linux: python3 -m virtualenv env

On Windows: py -m venv env The second argument is the location to create the virtual environment. Generally, you can just create this in your project and call it env.

Activate virtual encironment

On macOS and Linux: source env/bin/activate

On Windows Command Line: .\env\Scripts\activate.bat

One Windows Powershell .\env\Scripts\activate.ps1

Navigate to the repository folder and install packages

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Deploy Flask Application locally

Run flask

For Linux and Mac:

export FLASK_APP=coursecake/flaskapp
export FLASK_ENV=development
flask run

For Windows cmd, use set instead of export:

set FLASK_APP=coursecake/flaskapp
set FLASK_ENV=development
flask run

For Windows PowerShell, use $env: instead of export:

$env:FLASK_APP = "coursecake/flaskapp"
$env:FLASK_ENV = "development"
flask run

You’ll see output similar to this:

* Serving Flask app "coursecake/flaskapp"
* Environment: development
* Debug mode: on
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
* Restarting with stat
* Debugger is active!
* Debugger PIN: 855-212-761

donezo

Future features

• More comprehensive university information on departments, course prerequisites, restricts, etc.
• Prerequisite mapping to create a network of classes (along with a node graph GUI)
• HTTPS only
• IF ANYONE WANTS TO HELP LEMME KNOW PLSSSS ty