Hnac is a crawler for the hackernews firebase API.

Create a virtualenv

virtualenv --python=python3 virtualenv
source virtualenv/bin/activate

Install the package

python setup.py install

Create the configuration file .env and set the variables for the Postgresql database as well as a secret key.

SECRET="put-a-secret-key-here"
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI="postgresql+psycopg2://username:password@localhost:5432/hnac"

Edit the alembic.ini file and set the sqlalchemy.url variable to point to your database. Run the migrations.

alembic upgrade head

Create a user so that it is possible to access the API

hnac users create --username username --password user_password

Start the API server

hnac runserver

You can crawl hacker news using the crawl command. You should create a cron job that will execute this command in a time interval of your choosing

hnac crawl

You can enable additional handlers in order to save the hackernews stories on a CouchDB database or publish them on RabbitMQ. See the example settings.py file in the templates folder for an example on how to use them.

TODO