A Webservice for Scraping Files and Plotting Data Against Presidential Party Variation

patella uses Flask to host an interactive html/css/js frontend through which users can navigate to data and plot it.

Flask Url Paths

patella uses the http GET and POST commands to send data between one page and another. The homepage paths are / and /index from which you can navigate to the rest of the front end.

Install and Run Directions

patella is uploaded to the pip package repository.

To install, simply run pip install patella. A requirements.txt file that comes with the package specifies its dependencies. Install these with pip install -r requirements.txt. It is recommended you run this in a virtual environment so as not to interfere with previous installations.

To start the Flask server, run patella startup <URL>, where URL is the path to be prepended to the page url. Next, use a browser to browse to 127.0.0.1:4444. To access the service from other computers on the same network, use the public ip of the host computer on port 4444. From these two addresses the webservice can be accessed as long as the server is running.

Files

Log Files

A log file will be generated in the path that you run the webservice from named webservice.log. this file includes server reloads, error reporting, logs get and post requests and debugger pins. POST and GET logs are timestamped, but others are not

Data Files

Data files from the webservice will be downloaded to a data/ directory created at runtime in the directory the server is started from. In that directory, all files downloaded from the webservice will be browseable.