UK Planning Scraper

PRE-ALPHA: Only works with some Idox sites and spews a lot of stuff to STDOUT. Not for production use.

This gem scrapes planning applications data from UK council/local planning authority websites, eg Westminster City Council. Data is returned as an array of hashes, one hash for each planning application.

This scraper gem doesn’t use a database. Storing the output is up to you. It’s just a convenient way to get the data.

Currently this only works for some Idox sites. The ultimate aim is to provide a consistent interface in a single gem for all variants of all planning systems: Idox Public Access, Northgate Planning Explorer, OcellaWeb, and all the one-off systems.

This project is not affiliated with any organisation.

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'uk_planning_scraper', :git => 'https://github.com/adrianshort/uk_planning_scraper/'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install specific_install
$ gem specific_install adrianshort/uk_planning_scraper

Usage

require 'uk_planning_scraper'
require 'date'
require 'pp'

# change this to the URL of the advanced search page for the council you want
url = 'https://planning.anytown.gov.uk/online-applications/search.do?action=advanced'

options = {
  delay: 10, # seconds between scrape requests; optional, defaults to 10
}

params = {
  validated_from: Date.today - 30, # Must be a Date object; optional
  validated_to: Date.today, # Must be a Date object; optional
  description: 'keywords to search for', # Optional
}

apps = UKPlanningScraper.search(url, params, options)
pp apps

Try ScraperWiki if you want a quick and easy way to throw the results into an SQLite database:

require 'scraperwiki' # Must be installed, of course
ScraperWiki.save_sqlite([:council_reference], apps)

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/adrianshort/uk_planning_scraper.