Generate podcast clips related to daily top submissions on Hacker News via web scraping with Python & Selenium, generative ai with Ollama and LLama2, Transcript generation OpenAI Whisper, iTunes Podcast Search, and more.

Coming soon

• Python 3.10 and up
• A Bright Data Account (includes $25 credit)
• ffmpeg (required for transcribing audio with OpenAI Whisper)

In this repo, we use a web scraping proxy service from Bright Data. Using a proxy service makes our requests more reliable. You can see the actual code for the Selenium-based remote connection here src/helpers/brightdata.py.

our computer -> request -> proxy -> web server -> proxy -> response -> our computer

our computer -> request -> web server -> response -> our computer

# from 'src/2 - Connection Sample.ipynb'
from selenium.webdriver import Remote, ChromeOptions

# import this function
from helpers.brightdata import get_sbr_connection

options = ChromeOptions()

# options.headless = True # old method
options.add_argument("--headless=new") # new method

url = 'https://news.ycombinator.com'

with Remote(sbr_connection, options=options) as driver:
    driver.get(url)
    print(driver.page_source)

mkdir -p ~/dev/smarter-scraping
cd ~/dev/smarter-scraping
git clone https://github.com/codingforentrepreneurs/Smarter-Web-Scraping-with-Python .

Use the course_start branch with:

mac/linux

git checkout course_start
rm -rf .git 
git init

windows

git checkout course_start
Remove-Item .git -Recurse -Force
git init

cd ~/dev/smarter-scraping # or where you cloned the repo

mac/linux

python3 -m venv venv

windows

c:\Python311\python.exe -m venv venv

Always activate your environment!

cd ~/dev/smarter-scraping # or where you cloned the repo

mac/linux

source venv/bin/activate

windows

.\venv\Scripts\activate

If done correctly, your command line should start with (venv)

With virtual envionoment activated (e.g. (venv)), run:

(venv) python -m pip install pip --upgrade
(venv) python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

mac/linux

cp sample-env-file .env

windows

Copy-Item .env.sample -Destination .env

Be sure to add your Bright Data proxy information:

• BRIGHT_DATA_USERNAME
• BRIGHT_DATA_PASSWORD
• BRIGHT_DATA_HOST

Add Ollama data too (for Running the OpenAI drop-in replacement Llama2)

• OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1
• OPENAI_API_KEY=ollama
• OPENAI_COMPLETION_MODEL=llama2

With code that lives inside the src/ directory, you can import the helpers module to load your environment variables.

We created a simple function to extend the incredible python-decouple package (it's in src/helpers/env.py):

import helpers

MY_VAR = helpers.config('MY_VAR', default="Not set", cast=str)

Explore the notebooks!

jupyter notebook