batcoms

Battles and Commanders ·

About

Battles and Commanders is a Wikipedia scraper and API that serves historical battles, commanders and their factions. You can try the API and read its documentation here.

This project is still work in progress. Also, consider that scrapers are brittle: they are subject to the webpage's HTML structure updates, and if Wikipedia decides to alter its HTML, this scraper may stop working if not properly updated.

Setup

Development

For both the scraper and the API, settings may be changed by editing the file in config/config.yaml, but I see no reason to change their current values.

Scraper

$ go run cmd/scraper/main.go

After a successful run, the file data.json should have been created at the root dir of this project, containing normalized battles, factions and commanders.

API

1. Make sure you have a Postgres instance running.

2. Turn on the API on port 3000:

   $ go run cmd/api/main.go
   

3. If you have not yet, then you will need to also run the seeder. The seeder can setup the database by either reading from local files or from remote files whose URLs have been supplied:

   $ go run cmd/seeder/main.go -dataURL="https://bit.ly/3dOeqyZ"
   

   If you already ran the scraper and the data.json file is available in the root dir of the project, then the dataURL option is unnecessary.

Running via Docker

# Start database and app server via docker-compose
$ docker-compose up -d

# Additionally, seeders should be ran
$ docker exec api ./seeder -dataURL="https://bit.ly/3dOeqyZ"

# Stop docker containers:
$ docker-compose stop

Now the api should be available on port 3000 of your machine.

Installing for use with your own Go projects

Some of the functionality used by both the scraper and the API is publicly available for use outside this project, inside the pkg dir. To install, simply run:

$ go get github.com/sasalatart/batcoms

Some usage examples include:

1. Scraping a list of potential battles (names and urls only, false positives may be included):

   package main
   
   import (
      "github.com/sasalatart/batcoms/pkg/logger"
      "github.com/sasalatart/batcoms/pkg/scraper/list"
   )
   
   func main() {
      loggerService := logger.NewDiscard() // Or anything that implements logger.Interface
      potentialBattles := list.Scrape(loggerService)
   }
   

2. Scraping specific battles:

   package main
   
   import (
      "github.com/sasalatart/batcoms/pkg/logger"
      "github.com/sasalatart/batcoms/pkg/scraper/battles"
   )
   
   func main() {
      loggerService := logger.NewDiscard() // Or anything that implements logger.Interface
      scraperService := battles.NewScraper(loggerService)
   
      austerlitz, err := scraperService.ScrapeOne("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Austerlitz")
      // Handle error and optionally do something with normalized Battle of Austerlitz...
      actium, err := scraperService.ScrapeOne("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Actium")
      // Handle error and optionally do something with normalized Battle of Actium...
   
      // Each battle contains normalized data (ids of factions and commanders), so we export everything
      data := scraperService.Data()
      // Do something with data.BattlesByID, data.FactionsByID and/or data.CommandersByID...
   }
   

3. Cleaning scraped text:

   package main
   
   import "github.com/sasalatart/batcoms/pkg/strclean"
   
   func main() {
      input := "Soviet victory:[1]\n\nDestruction of the German 6th Army"
      output := strclean.Apply(input) // "Soviet victory: Destruction of the German 6th Army"
   }
   

4. Parsing Wikipedia's Info Box date text (accuracy improvements are still WIP...):

   package main
   
   import "github.com/sasalatart/batcoms/pkg/dates"
   
   func main() {
      d1 := "January-March 309 B.C."
      parsed1, err := dates.Parse(d1)
      // []dates.Historic{
      //   dates.Historic{ Year: 309, Month: 1, Day: 0, IsBCE: true },
      //   dates.Historic{ Year: 309, Month: 3, Day: 0, IsBCE: true },
      // }
      // Handle error and do something with parsed1...
   
      d2 := "July 6, 1950; 69 years ago (1950-07-06)"
      parsed2, err := dates.Parse(d2)
      // []dates.Historic{dates.Historic{ Year: 1950, Month: 7, Day: 6, IsBCE: false }}
      // Handle error and do something with parsed2...
   }
   

Testing

Unit & integration tests have been included. In order to run the integration tests properly, the API must be running in test mode, and Postgres should also be running. Tests can be ran as follows:

# Shell 1: Turn on the API in test mode
$ go run cmd/api/main.go -test

# Shell 2: Run the actual tests
$ go test ./...

Credits

Special thanks to Wikipedia and the content-creators that have provided the historical data served and scraped by this app, and which are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

License

Copyright (c) 2020, Sebastián Salata Ruiz-Tagle

Battles and Commanders is MIT licensed.