Parking Requirement Database

(for database credentials: place database.ini file into repo directory on your machine)

Current development:

• web scraping/crawling
• ORM database management
• PostgreSQL database
• currently hosted by Supabase
• Wiki documentation

Future development:

• NLP
• Website
• Aggregation and other data analysis

For Windows users:

Due to the use of scrapy-playwright (loading js elements when using scrapy), we recommend installing WSL/Ubuntu to run the scrapy spider.

However, you may want to still have a conda environment on your Windows environment for quick debugging and development through your IDE (ex. VSCode, PyCharm, etc).

Other utilities to consider include this for commands like view(response) in scrapy shell.

There may be more dependencies to install including:

• playwright install-deps
• etc

Installing conda environment

1. Open Anaconda Prompt
2. Create conda environment from environment.yml: has all the necessary libraries and packages (including ipykernel)

   (base) > conda env create -f environment-[os].yml
   

   NOTE: environment.yml will need to be updated if we need to use more packages
3. Main packages:
   • SQLAlchemy 2.0
   • Camelot
   • Selenium
   • Beautiful Soup 4
   • ipykernel
   • lxml
   • html5lib
   • pandas, numpy
   • scrapy
   • scrapy-playwright
4. Use the following command to update environmental.yml

      conda env export > environment.yml
   

Web scraping/crawling

(currently trying to migrate from selenium/bs4 into scrapy)

1. In the web_crawling folder (has settings.py and a folder called web_crawling)

   scrapy crawl munispider
   

2. Check out the wiki for updated information

Extra installation step for Jupyter Notebook

1. Open Anaconda Prompt
2. Install nb_conda_kernels in base environment: allows you to access conda environments in Jupyter Notebook (as long as ipykernel is installed)

   (base) > conda install nb_conda_kernels
   

3. When running .ipynb, switch kernel to "Python [conda env: db_env]"
4. A quick test to make sure the environment/kernel is working.

   import sqlalchemy
   sqlalchemy.__version__
   >> '2.0.12'
   

Inserting into database

0. Download Chrome driver. Change path of chrome driver in get_html() in scraper_functions.py.
1. Main function is create_csv_url() in data_processing.py

   from data_processing import *
   create_csv_url("CA", "Los Angeles County", [insert url], [insert table number])   # web-scrape
   create_csv_url("CA", "Los Angeles County")   # if csv exists
   

2. Follow prompts

Reading database

1. Main function is read_database() in database_functions.py

   from database_functions import *
   read_database()
   

2. Follow prompts

Reading pdfs

1. Main function is read_pdf() in scraper_functions.py
2. Install Ghostscript via your OS here
3. Run function with parameters