Skip to content
/ JailJawn Public

Build a web scraper for the daily Philadelphia Prison Census and make that data beautiful and useful for citizens and academic research.

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

ST215/JailJawn

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

62 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

Jail Jawn

Data Source: (http://www.phila.gov/prisons/page.htm)

What is Jail Jawn and Why?

This is the repository for the JailJawn.com scraper code written in Python. This started as a project to learn Python and Serverless deployment.

The following code in the repository accesses the static page provided by The City of Philadelphia Department of Prisons Census page (http://www.phila.gov/prisons/page.htm). This web page is generated internally possible by a human at infrequent times using Excel to HTML which doesn't create clean tables for scraping which requires a custom solution which as been implemented.

The Python code is deployed to Amazon Web Services Lambda running on a daily CRON job. Once the data is scraped via AWS Lambda it is pushed to our Google Firebase instance for permanent storage.

From the Google Firebase instance, we use Heroku to push the data API to the web using Javascript to render the charts on the client side.

The repositories for the those are located here: API: https://github.com/JailJawn/JailJawnAPI WebApp / Site: https://github.com/JailJawn/jailjawnapp

Any questions I can be found on Website: http://www.StanleyGriggs.com/

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ST215

Feel free to make issue tickets and suggestions.

Goal

Historical Inmate Data, Beautiful Charts, and The Ability see trends over time.

Tech:

Python Requests (http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/) Python lxml (http://lxml.de/)

Steps to run on Windows

Download Python

1. http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/install/#install

Set up Python Path

1. Open Control Panel
2. Go To Security and Systems
3. Go to System
4. Open Advanced System Settings
5. Go to the "Advanced" tab and open Environmental Variables
6. Scoll down to "Path" in System Variables and then double-click
7. Add the local address of your Python library to the Variable Value field (For example: C:\Python27)
	-If there are any other paths in the field then seperate them with a semicolon (For example C:\Java_lib;C:\Python27)

####Download Requests

1. clone git://github.com/kennethreitz/requests.git
2. Open terminal and run python setup.py install

Download lxml

1. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml/3.2.3

About

Build a web scraper for the daily Philadelphia Prison Census and make that data beautiful and useful for citizens and academic research.

Topics

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages