ra-scraper: Resident Advisor event scraper

Scrape Resident Advisor (RA) to find out where and when your favourite (techno) artists are playing.

Prerequisites

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

The code is run and tested with Python 3.7.5 on macOS 10.14.6 and Ubuntu 18.04.5.

Environment

Clone the repo to your local machine. Create a virtual environment for Python 3 with:

virtualenv -p python3 env

Activate the virtual environment with:

source env/bin/activate

Install the required Python packages with:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Artists

Within the scraper/artists.txt file specify all artists you want to scrape events for (one per line).

Artist names should be in a format such that a valid RA url https://www.residentadvisor.net/dj/ARTIST_NAME exists.

Running the scraper (spider)

This project uses the scrapy Python library (tutorial here).

You can find the spider with the name ra_artist_spider in the file scraper/scraper/spiders/ra_artist_spider.py.

To start the spider and save results locally please run:

make build

If you want to recursively scrape events of artists mentioned in the lineup section on the event pages scraped for the initially given artists, set the following value in scraper/scraper/settings.py:

RECURSIVE = True

This setting can result in a very large number of requests, which can be controlled by CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT or CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT.

Example output

Every run of make build produces three JSON Line files (data models in scraper/scraper/items.py). The first one contains general event information for the given artists, the second and third ones contain the lineup and price information for these events, if available.

For example (one artist only, no recursive scraping):

1. EventItem.jsonl (four events on artist page Solomun)

{"id": "1319532", "artist": "Solomun", "date": "Tue, 31 Dec 2019", "title": "NYE with Solomun & Jamie Jones by Link Miami Rebels", "link": "https://www.residentadvisor.net/events/1319532", "venue": "Space", "city": "Miami"}
{"id": "1363163", "artist": "Solomun", "date": "Sat, 04 Jan 2020", "title": "Solomun 1 Maceo Plex Tulum", "link": "https://www.residentadvisor.net/events/1363163", "venue": "Templo Xunanha Tulum", "city": "South"}
{"id": "1363420", "artist": "Solomun", "date": "Sat, 25 Apr 2020", "title": "Solomun Paris 2020", "link": "https://www.residentadvisor.net/events/1363420", "venue": "La Seine Musicale / Seguin", "city": "Paris"}
{"id": "1352870", "artist": "Solomun", "date": "Sat, 20 Jun 2020", "title": "Diynamic - Off Week Festival", "link": "https://www.residentadvisor.net/events/1352870", "venue": "Parc Del Forum", "city": "Barcelona"}

2. EventLineupItem.jsonl (four events with lineup section available)

{"id": "1319532", "lineup": ["Solomun", "Jamie Jones", "Danyelino", "Thunderpony"]}
{"id": "1363163", "lineup": ["Solomun", "Maceo Plex"]}
{"id": "1363420", "lineup": ["Solomun"]}
{"id": "1352870", "lineup": ["Solomun"]}

3. EventPriceItem.jsonl (three events with price section available, both sold-out and on-sale event prices)

{"id": "1319532", "closed_prices": [["$20.00", "1st release (entry before 12AM)"], ["$50.00", "2nd release (entry before 12AM)"], ["$80.00", "3rd release (entry before 12AM)"], ["$150.00", "4th release (entry before 12AM)"], ["$80.00", "1st release (entry before 3 AM)"], ["$100.00", "2nd release (entry before 3 AM)"], ["$120.00", "3rd release (entry before 3 AM)"], ["$100.00", "1st release (entry ANYTIME)"], ["$120.00", "2nd release (entry ANYTIME)"], ["$150.00", "3rd release (entry ANYTIME)"], ["$250.00", "4th release (entry ANYTIME)"], ["$80.00", "1st release (entry AFTER 10 AM)"], ["$100.00", "2nd release (entry AFTER 10 AM)"], ["$120.00", "3rd release (entry AFTER 10 AM)"], ["$70.00", "1st release (entry AFTER 12 PM)"], ["$60.00", "1st release (entry AFTER 2 PM)"], ["$80.00", "2nd release (entry AFTER 2 PM)"]], "onsale_prices": [["$100.00 + $12.50", "2nd release (entry AFTER 12 PM)"]]}
{"id": "1363420", "closed_prices": [], "onsale_prices": [["35,00 € + 4,40 €", "1st release"], ["100,00 € + 12,50 €", "Backstage - VIP"]]}
{"id": "1352870", "closed_prices": [["19,50 €", "Early bird "], ["29,50 €", "1st release"]], "onsale_prices": [["39,50 € + 4,95 €", "2nd release"], ["150,00 € + 18,75 €", "Backstage experience"], ["49,00 € + 6,10 €", "FRIDAY ALL PARK TICKET (Afterlife+Arpiar+Solid Grooves)"], ["49,00 € + 6,10 €", "SATURDAY ALL PARK TICKET (Diynamic+FRRC+Secretsundaze)"], ["99,00 € + 12,40 €", "WEEKEND ALL PARK TICKET (All Events)"], ["300,00 € + 37,50 €", "Weekend backstage experience "]]}

In order to additionally create a JSONL or CSV file with all results, set the following values in scraper/scraper/settings.py:

FEED_EXPORTERS = {"jsonlines": "scrapy.exporters.JsonLinesItemExporter"}
FEED_FORMAT = "jsonlines"
FEED_URI = "results.jsonl"

FEED_EXPORTERS = {"csv": "scrapy.exporters.CsvItemExporter"}
FEED_FORMAT = "csv"
FEED_URI = "results.csv"

Email notifications

To send the content in EventItem.jsonl via eMail to your Google mail account run:

make notify

You need to set the environment variables ACCOUNT (eMail address) and SECRET (password) before.

Further settings are available in scraper/notifications.py.

For daily notifications, you can use GitHub Actions and deploy the workflow with the .github/workflows/app.yml file.

To-do list

• Event lineup and price collection
• Email notifications
• Visualizations/stats (Dash front-end?)
• Database connection
• Resident Advisor API

Authors

• Manuel Zander

License

See LICENSE