What is this?

A streaming async API to 4chan boards. You create a handler class, implement some callbacks and get informed when new posts and images arrive in threads. There's a bundled FileHandler that saves content to the file system and a SQLiteHandler that saves posts in per-date SQLite DBs.

NOTE: the FileHandler will eat up your inodes, a default Debian install scraping /b/ got exhausted in ~ 6 months. Use the SQLiteHandler unless you plan to clean the file root regularly.

How?

The bundled executable called hurr-durr is a scraper. You use it as

hurr-durr --directory /tmp/4chan/sqlite-files --board b

There's an optional -i flag to also download the images and a -v flag to see logging information.

Storage defaults to SQLite DB per day, unless overridden via -f file, which produces 1 JSON file per thread in a structure of data_dir/YYYYmmdd/threadID/threadID.json.

All this info is also available via the -h flag.

As for the API part, the main entry point is hurr_durr.ChanWatcher. You have to implement a handler class and then do something along the lines of

from hurr_durr import FileHandler, ChanWatcher

watcher = ChanWatcher(FileHandler('/tmp/4chan/b'), 'b', images=True)
watcher.start()

or

from hurr_durr import SQLiteHandler, ChanWatcher

watcher = ChanWatcher(SQLiteHandler('/tmp/4chan/b'), 'b')
watcher.start()

The handlers currently bundled are FileHandler which saves content to disk in files and SQLiteHandler, which saves posts in SQLite DBs. To implement your own handler, you need to create a class inheriting from Handler, containing 4 methods:

• post(thread_id, new_post) -- gets called when a new post is made in a thread
• pruned(thread_id) -- gets called when a thread is pruned from 4chan
• img(thread_id, filename, data) -- gets called with downloaded image data, only relevant if images are downloaded
• download_img(thread_id, filename) -- gets called to check if a particular image should be downloaded, only relevant if images are downloaded

Installing

It's in PyPI, just use pip

pip install hurr-durr

Why?

Because I needed a 4chan scraper, everything else sucked, and I wanted to give Tornado a ride around the block.

License

Copyright 2014 Emils Solmanis

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.