Objective

Explore the API based integration points for autotrader.com by leveraging Python Programming Language.

No account is required for interacting with autotrader.com's APIs Operations that were explored in this project

Workspace Configuration

Pre-Requisites

• Make sure that Python3 is installed in your environment
• If using vscode, it would be suggested to install the recommended plugins

Initial Setup

Creating and Activating a Python Virtual Environment

From the workspace's root folder, please type the following commands:

python3 -m venv .venv
. ./.venv/bin/activate

Upgrading pip

python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

Requirement already satisfied: pip in /opt/homebrew/lib/python3.10/site-packages (23.0.1)
Collecting pip
Using cached pip-23.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (2.1 MB)
Installing collected packages: pip
Attempting uninstall: pip
    Found existing installation: pip 23.0.1
    Uninstalling pip-23.0.1:
    Successfully uninstalled pip-23.0.1
Successfully installed pip-23.1.2

Installing the Request Py Library

We need all the libraries required for REST API Calls as well as a MVC Web Framework.

pip install requests

Collecting requests
Downloading requests-2.31.0-py3-none-any.whl (62 kB)
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 62.6/62.6 kB 1.7 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Collecting urllib3<3,>=1.21.1
Downloading urllib3-2.0.2-py3-none-any.whl (123 kB)
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Requirement already satisfied: certifi>=2017.4.17 in /opt/homebrew/lib/python3.10/site-packages (from requests) (2022.12.7)
Collecting charset-normalizer<4,>=2
Downloading charset_normalizer-3.1.0-cp310-cp310-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl (123 kB)
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Collecting idna<4,>=2.5
Downloading idna-3.4-py3-none-any.whl (61 kB)
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Installing collected packages: urllib3, idna, charset-normalizer, requests
Successfully installed charset-normalizer-3.1.0 idna-3.4 requests-2.31.0 urllib3-2.0.2

Installing the Request Py Library

pip install flask

Collecting flask
Downloading Flask-2.3.2-py3-none-any.whl (96 kB)
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Collecting Werkzeug>=2.3.3 (from flask)
Downloading Werkzeug-2.3.4-py3-none-any.whl (242 kB)
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Collecting Jinja2>=3.1.2 (from flask)
Downloading Jinja2-3.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (133 kB)
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Collecting itsdangerous>=2.1.2 (from flask)
Downloading itsdangerous-2.1.2-py3-none-any.whl (15 kB)
Collecting click>=8.1.3 (from flask)
Downloading click-8.1.3-py3-none-any.whl (96 kB)
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 96.6/96.6 kB 3.7 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Collecting blinker>=1.6.2 (from flask)
Downloading blinker-1.6.2-py3-none-any.whl (13 kB)
Collecting MarkupSafe>=2.0 (from Jinja2>=3.1.2->flask)
Downloading MarkupSafe-2.1.2-cp310-cp310-macosx_10_9_universal2.whl (17 kB)
Installing collected packages: MarkupSafe, itsdangerous, click, blinker, Werkzeug, Jinja2, flask
Successfully installed Jinja2-3.1.2 MarkupSafe-2.1.2 Werkzeug-2.3.4 blinker-1.6.2 click-8.1.3 flask-2.3.2 itsdangerous-2.1.2

Let's get started with the application

Parametrization

In the ImportCarRequests.py script, you can change the request parameters as suited

params = dict(
    zip=90210,
    makeCodeList='ROV',
    modelCodeList='DEFEND',
    marketExtension='true',
    maxMileage=150000,
    startYear=1980,
    endYear=2013,
    searchRadius=500,
    maxPrice=100000,
    sortBy='mileageASC',
    numRecords=100,
    firstRecord=0,
    style='Truck'
)

Script Execution

python3 ./ImportCarRequests.py 

684092397       ---     27958 mi        42500$  2024-05-27      42500$  SALDH1285PA537706
684092411       ---     36000 mi        22000$  2024-05-27      22000$  SALDV324XVA934925
663965783       ---     59349 mi        94999$  2023-11-13      94999$  SALDV3243VA130787
672325558       ---     71772 mi        69880$  2024-02-08      69880$  SALLDVAF7TA970849
684092332       ---     86991 mi        35000$  2024-05-27      35000$  SALDV3247VA264587

References

• Autotrader.com APIs Specification for developers
• Using Python in VSCode