scraper-auto-trader

A python project utilising the scrapy framework to scrape Auto Trader adverts data.

Data to be used for a personal Machine Learning project to predict car ad pricing based on a number of feature variables.

NOTE: This project is for educational purposes and should not be used for purposes that would break the TOS of the Auto Trader platform.

Getting Started

These instructions will get the project set up on your local machine for running the tool.

Prerequisites

1. Python (version 3+) installed
2. pip package installer installed (usually installed with python versions later than 2.7.9 or 3.4)
3. (optional) virtualenv package installed
4. requirements.txt run to install project dependencies

Running Package

There are three spiders that will crawl Auto Trader for the necessary data:

1. car_makes - Spider for crawling all root car makes URLs e.g. Ford, Mercedes
2. car_models - Spider for crawling all root car models URLs e.g. Ford Focus, Mercedes GLA Class
3. car_ads - Spider for crawling all ad pages for provided car models

These three spiders have been separated out to give flexibility to the user if they want to scrape a specific make and model of car for ad data.

Running Spiders

The three spiders need to be run in the sequential order as stated above.

car_makes

scrapy crawl car_makes

• Running this spider will populate the url_lists/makes_list.txt file with a list of URLs for all car makes.
• Before running the next spider, the user can remove URLs for car makes they do not want to scrape.

car_models

scrapy crawl car_models

• Running this spider will populate the url_lists/models_list.txt file with a list of URLs for all car models that were present in the makes_list.txt file.
• Before running the final spider, the user can remove URLs for car models they do not want to scrape.

car_ads

scrapy crawl car_ads -o ads_output.csv

NOTE: You can also output a JSON file and change the name of the output file by changing the 'ads_output.csv' parameter when running the spider.

• This spider will loop through the models_list.txt file, finding all search results pages and will scrape the following information:

[
    'make',
    'model'
    'title',
    'url',
    'ad_id',
    'number_images',
    'attention_grabber',
    'extra_detail',
    'category_damage',
    'year',
    'registration',
    'body_type',
    'mileage',
    'engine_size',
    'bhp',
    'transmission',
    'fuel_type',
    'doors',
    'listing_description',
    'seller_type',
    'miles_from_wc2r',
    'price'
]

logs

When the spiders are running, there will be some high level information in the command prompt / terminal while running.

For more detail, a log.txt file is generated that shows more detailed information such as time spider run, errors, number of pages scraped etc.

Extra Information

Hope you enjoy this scraping tool. Please let me know your feedback or suggestion for improvements.

To Do

• add logging information to show progress to end user in command prompt