news-please

<img align="right" height="128px" width"128px" src="/misc/logo/logo-256.png" /> news-please is an open source, easy-to-use news crawler that extracts structured information from almost any news website. It can follow recursively internal hyperlinks and read RSS feeds to fetch both most recent and also old, archived articles. You only need to provide the root URL of the news website. news-please combines the power of multiple state-of-the-art libraries and tools such as scrapy, Newspaper, and readability.

Extracted information

headline
lead paragraph
main content (textual)
main image
author's name
publication date
language

Features

works out of the box: install with pip, add URLs of your pages, run :-)
execute it conveniently with the CLI or use it as a library within your own software
runs on your favorite Python version (2.7+ and 3+)

CLI mode

stores extracted results in JSON files or ElasticSearch (other storages can be added easily)
simple but extensive configuration (if you want to tweak the results)
revisions: crawl articles multiple times and track changes

Library mode

crawl and extract information for a list of article URLs (currently the fullsite-crawling is only supported via the CLI)

Getting started

It's super easy, we promise!

Installation

$ sudo pip install news-please

Use within your own code (as a library)

from newsplease import NewsPlease
article = NewsPlease.download_article('https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/us/politics/cpac-stephen-bannon-reince-priebus.html?hp')
print(article['title'])

or if you want to crawl multiple articles at a time

NewsPlease.download_articles([url1, url2, ...])

Run the crawler (via the CLI)

$ news-please

news-please will then start crawling a few examples pages. To terminate the process simply press CTRL+C. news-please will then shutdown within 5-60 seconds. You can also press CTRL+C twice, which will immediately kill the process (not recommended, though).

The results are stored by default in JSON files in the data folder. In the default configuration, news-please also stores the original HTML files.

Crawl other pages

Of course, you want to crawl other websites. Simply go into the sitelist.hjson file and add the root URLs of the news outlets' webpages of your choice.

ElasticSearch

news-please also supports export to ElasticSearch. Using Elasticsearch will also enable the versioning feature. First, enable it in the config.cfg at the config directory, which is by default ~/news-please/config but can be changed also with the -c parameter to a custom location. In case the directory does not exist, a default directory will be created at the specified location.

[Scrapy]

ITEM_PIPELINES = {
                   'newscrawler.pipeline.pipelines.ElasticSearchStorage':350
                 }

That's it! Except, if your Elasticsearch database is not located at http://localhost:9200, uses a different username / password or CA-certificate authentication. In these cases, you will also need to change the following.

[Elasticsearch]

host = localhost
port = 9200	

...

# Credentials used  for authentication (supports CA-certificates):

use_ca_certificates = False'           #If True authentification is performed 
ca_cert_path = '/path/to/cacert.pem'  
client_cert_path = '/path/to/client_cert.pem'  
client_key_path = '/path/to/client_key.pem'  
username = 'root'  
secret = 'password'

What's next?

We have collected a bunch of useful information for both users and developers. As a user, you will most likely only deal with two files: sitelist.hjson (to define sites to be crawled) and config.cfg (probably only rarely, in case you want to tweak the configuration).

Future improvements

Better error handling incl. more descriptive messages
Better logging (currently, we think that the logging is either too detailed or too silent)
Improvement of detection whether a page is a news article or not

Wiki and documentation

You can find more information on usage and development in our wiki!

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the contributions of the following students (ordered alphabetically):

Moritz Bock
Michael Fried
Jonathan Hassler
Markus Klatt
Kevin Kress
Sören Lachnit
Marvin Pafla
Franziska Schlor
Matt Sharinghousen
Claudio Spener
Moritz Steinmaier

How to cite

If you are using news-please, please cite our paper:

@InProceedings{Hamborg2017,
  author     = {{H}amborg, {F}elix and {M}euschke, {N}orman and {B}reitinger, {C}orinna and {G}ipp, {B}ela},
  title      = {{news-please}: {A} {G}eneric {N}ews {C}rawler and {E}xtractor},
  year       = {2017},
  booktitle  = {{P}roceedings of the 15th {I}nternational {S}ymposium of {I}nformation {S}cience},
  location   = {Berlin},
}

Contribution

You want to contribute? Great, we are always happy for any support on this project! Simply send a pull request or drop us an email: felix.hamborg@uni-konstanz.de. By contributing to this project, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the project's license (see below).

License

The project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Make sure that you use news-please in compliance with applicable law. The news-please logo is courtesy of Mario Hamborg.

toabey / news-please