scrapers-us-municipal

DataMade's source for municipal scrapers feeding ocd.datamade.us.

See the upstream README for instructions on local installation and development of the scrapers.

Development

Making changes to this fork

Changes should only be made to this fork if they are related to deployment, configuration or task scheduling. All changes to scraper functionality should be made upstream in opencivicdata/scrapers-us-municipal.

As such, we want changes in this repo to all be rebased off opencivicdata/scrapers-us-municipal.

First, set up your upstream branch.

bash git remote add upstream https://github.com/opencivicdata/scrapers-us-municipal.git

Then pull from origin of this fork.

bash git pull origin master

Commit your local changes, if any. Next, rebase your changes onto upstream master.

bash git pull upstream master

bash git push origin master

Scheduling

The Chicago scrapers are scheduled using the crontab in the scripts/ directory of this repository.

The LA Metro scrapers are scheduled via Airflow. The production Airflow instance is located at la-metro-dashboard.datamade.us. DataMade staff can find login credentials under the Metro support email in LastPass. The underlying code is in the datamade/la-metro-dashboard repository.

Deploying changes

This repo uses GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment. To trigger a production deployment, sync the master branch with the deploy branch:

bash git push origin master:deploy

Pushing to the master and deploy branches will deploy the code to the OCD server (for scrapes scheduled by cron) and create a GitHub Container Registry build tagged with the relevant branch name (for scrapes scheduled by Airflow, which are run in containers).

Logging

Handling unresolved bills

For LA Metro, we have alerting set up to notify us if pupa is not able to resolve a board report associated with an agenda item. This is an important diagnostic tool to help us track down why some board reports are not getting scraped.

Some board reports are not getting scraped because they have not been made public and will not be made public. When LA Metro tells us that they will not make a board report public, we should "ignore" that alert in Sentry. Also add a comment that you were directed by LA Metro that this board report will not be made public.

We take this approach instead of editing the scraper to ignore certain bills because it's possible that LA Metro may decide to change their mind about what to make public sometime in the future.