NYCGovJobSearch

A Python based data scrape of https://www1.nyc.gov/jobs/index.page to provide help those seeking a career in civil service.

Website implementation of this data(WIP) can be seen here- https://www.murphy-dev.com

About

This project provides a list of jobs from the NYC Jobs search site, grouped by category, agency, and more. In addition, it provides a direct shareable link to jobs, something the website does not directly support.

The main project script(jobCheck.py) outputs JSON and CSV files.By default, it scrapes the job search pages for information on jobs by agency only, including links.

To get full job details from JSON files, run getJobDetails.py. This can optionally run multiple threads, and check a database to avoid duplicate work. Help files are linked below.

Sample output files are in the sample_Outputs folder.

Agency names were taken from NYC Open Data Civil List, by using the SODA Api, which uses the SoQL SQL based query language.

Current Progress

• Web scraping of search page, as well as following job links.
• Scraped jobs sorted by agency and agency code, in addition to category.
• Outputs to CSV and JSON, accepting custom names in the command line.
• Implemented multithreading for the job link scrape.

Usage and Examples

Help file

Run python jobcheck.py -h to get the following:

usage: jobCheck.py [-h] [-afile AGENCYFILE] [-cfile CATEGORYFILE]

NYCGov Job site scraper. Outputs JSON and CSV files by job category and by
specific agency.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -afile AGENCYFILE, --agencyfile AGENCYFILE
                        Agency JSON and CSV file names.
  -cfile CATEGORYFILE, --categoryfile CATEGORYFILE
                        Category JSON and CSV file names.

Run python getJobDetails.py -h to get the following:

usage: getJobDetails.py [-h] [--joblinkfile JOBLINKFILE] [-pc THREADNUM] [-ofile OUTFILE] [-checkDB]

Multithread implementation of the job link scraper.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --joblinkfile JOBLINKFILE
                        JSON file to get links from.
  -pc THREADNUM, --threadnum THREADNUM
                        How many parallel processes to spawn. Default is cpu count.
  -ofile OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
                        Output file names
  -checkDB, --checkDB   Scrape based on database contents, and delete old entries. Database must be setup for proper function.

New File: checkDB.py. File will check database based on connection string in SQLAlchemy_Files folder db.py setup.

Examples

• To run job search scrape, with automatically generated prefix filenames of YYYY-MM-DD_TIME.
• Note Will not scrape links by default.
  python jobCheck.py
• Custom filenames can be specified as well
  python jobCheck.py -afile AgencyFileName -cfile CategoryFileName
  Any unspecified options will be set to defaults.
• To scrape joblinks after the search is scraped
  python jobCheck.py -withlinks -jobout JobDetailsInfo
  Note jobout is an optional name for files.
• To run scrape of joblinks without scraping the search site
  python jobCheck.py --nosearch -searchjson AgencyJSONFile -jobout JobOutputFileName

Installation and Setup

Python 3.7 is required to run this project. Download from Python.org here. In addtion, make sure to have pip3 installed, and the Selenium Webdriver for Python.

Selenium setup- Firefox

By default, this project uses FireFox with Selenium Webdriver, and assumes you have a geckodriver. In the scrapermodule.py, you can set its location with the gecko_Location variable, if it is not on PATH or in the same directory.

If you want to use a different brower, modify the scraperModule.py fireFox_setup() function to use a different browser, and changes the options. As long as the function returns a browser object, you should be good!

For more details on Selenium Drivers see here

Dependency and environment management

For dependency and environment management, this project uses pipenv, or virtualenv. A list of packages is in the next section.
To install pipenv:
pip install pipenv

To install dependencies run:
pipenv install

To activate the environment run:
pipenv shell

From there you can jobCheck.py to generate a JSON file and CSV file. This is the preferred ways to get the data, and other methods provided in this repo will be updated afterwards.

NOTE: A SQL Server Database setup script is provided. However, the jobCheck.py file will make no attempt to connect to it, and it is NOT required to run.

Virtualenv dependencies are provided in requirements.txt in project root.

Python packages used in the project

In the Pipfile or requirements.txt

• selenium- the main web scraper component. Uses Firefox web browser.
• pyodbc- a module that provides connection to SQL Server. Unused outside of files that call dbtest.py.
• sqlalchemy- used to connect to database to perform filter searches.
• marshmallow- used to serialize and deserialize sqlalchemy objects.
• marshmallow-sqlalchemy- used to interface between SQLAlchemy and Marshmallow, mostly unused
• PyMysql- Module to connect to MYSQL databases.

Other packages used

• json- used to read to JSON file and read to CSV.
• time- used to track time of program execution.
• argparse- to parse command line arguments.

Next Steps

• Refinements as needed.
• Update support for SQL Server.
• Create SQL output file. (low priority)