mgribov/apiscrape

Generic HTTP REST API scraper with local cache

, _(*1)

JSON API scraper with local cache

Motivation - a transparent GET cache

I've encountered several APIs which were not as complex as Twitter or Facebook, but nice enough to utilize JSON and HTTP caching (Etag and Cache-Control) for GET requests., _(*2)

I needed to scrape them periodically and store their results somewhere for later exploration/use., _(*3)

apiscrape does just that - takes a URL with optional (but primitive for now) authentication, and stores the GET responses locally for later usage.
This library can also be used for real-time requests as well of course, not just scraping, and still provide local cache benefits., _(*4)

It uses MongoDB as the cache layer, so JSON is stored exactly as it is returned.
It wraps cURL, so it supports all other HTTP verbs as well, but will cache responses only for GETs., _(*5)

Limitations - no OAuth

Currently, only HTTP Basic and URL authentication is supported.
HTTP Basic authentication adds "Authorization: Basic" HTTP header.
URL authentication simply appends a secret to each request URL. (ex: ?secret=1234)
See src/Scrape/Auth for details, _(*6)

Install via Composer into existing project

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php # if composer is not installed
./composer.phar require mgribov/apiscrape

Examples

For a real-world complex example which inspired this library see Triptelligent PHP API wrapper, _(*7)

See examples/ folder for all use cases
Make sure you install composer and run "./composer.phar dump-autoload" first to use the examples if you just want to play around with it, _(*8)

<?php
// scrape some simple API with HTTP Basic auth
$api_token = '12345';
$api_secret = 'abcde';

$config = array(
    // configure mongo as local cache - required
    'storage' => array(
        'class' => "\\Scrape\\Storage\\Backend\\Mongo",
        'config' => array(
            'connection' => 'mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017',
            'database' => 'apiscrape',
            'collection' => 'api',
            )
        ),
    // configure HTTP Basic auth - optional
    'auth' => array(            
        'class' => '\\Scrape\\Auth\\HttpBasic',
        'config' => array(
            'user' => $api_token,
            'secret' => $api_secret
            ),
        ),
    );

$debug = true;
$cli = new \Scrape\Client\Client($config, $debug);

$data = $cli
    ->setCurlTimeout(20) // their api may be slow
    ->setStorageCacheTime(3600) // their api may not return Cache-Control headers
    ->get('https://api.example.com/object/1234');

Local Storage

For now, only 1 storage engine is supported, MongoDB.
See src/Scrape/Storage/Backend for details, _(*9)

The document structure in MongoDB is as follows:, _(*10)

{
    "_id" : ObjectId("1234567890abcdef"),
    "path" : "https://api.example.com/object/1234",
    "response" : {
        "user" : {
            "id": 1234,
            "name": "bob"
        }
    },
    "cache" : 1402931406,
    "etag" : "9331ce52904149e0325611517dfa4345"
}

_id - mongo auto-generated id, _(*11)

path - the actual URL, there is a unique index on this field, _(*12)

response - the exact JSON response from the API, _(*13)

cache - expiration timestamp in the future from Cache-Control or local configuration
If current time is less than this value, no HTTP request will be issued, and this object will be returned directly from cache, _(*14)

etag - optional Etag value returned by the API, _(*15)