The City of Chicago publishes vendor, contract, and payment information but the data is hidden behind a search form and formatted in a human-readable format. We are interested in liberating this data in a machine-readable format such as JSON so that it can be consumed by other applications.
- Solicitations - This website distinguishes solicitations into several types: bids, construction, demolition, proposal, and salvage
Install Firefox - http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
Libraries for this app will be managed with pip and virtualenv. If they aren't installed open a command prompt and run the following:
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
After you clone the repo, create/enable the virtualenv and install all the dependencies. Running:
source use_virtual_env.sh
will do both. You should see (vEnv) at the beginning of your command prompt.
To run the application from the command line run:
python driver.py
There is a very easy to follow guide to installing Python and Selenium for Windows at the Selenium Python Bindings documentation site.