📚 Textbook Price Web Scraper

A Web Scraping API for BarterOut

📊 Motivation

We want to offer the average price of textbooks that you can find on our site. To do this, we decided to scrape Google and other sites (in the future) to compute the average price of a textbook, and wrap it in an API.

🔨 Tools Used

• Python 3
• BeautifulSoup4
• Requests
• Flask

🔥 To Run the Project

Make sure to have Docker and docker-compose installed.

Then run docker-compose up or with the -d flag.

📓 Documentation

Currently, if you run docker-compose up, it will spin up a local dev server API that you can send requests to.

*Note: These results may be inaccurate, or, the program may just crash. It is still in the very early stages of dev.

Example Query:

GET localhost:3000/api/query/?title=Mind+on+Statistics

---

Response:

{
  "price": "89.9513043478261"
}

🙌 Future Plans:

• Specify the query site to scrape from
• Specify function (what results it returns)
• Find best (lowest) price and provide URL
• Anything you can dream of...