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https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please

news-please - an integrated web crawler and information extractor for news that just works
https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please

cc-news ccnews commoncrawl crawler data-gathering elasticsearch extract-articles extract-information extractor json news news-archive news-articles news-crawler news-extractor news-scraper news-websites nlp python roberta

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news-please - an integrated web crawler and information extractor for news that just works

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README 

        
# **news-please** #



[![PyPI version](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/news-please.svg)](https://pypi.org/project/news-please/)

[![DOI](https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.4120316.svg)](http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4120316)

[![Donate](https://img.shields.io/badge/Donate-PayPal-green.svg)](https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=XX272QZV9A2FN&source=url)






news-please is an open source, easy-to-use news crawler that extracts structured information from almost any news website. It can recursively follow internal hyperlinks and read RSS feeds to fetch both most recent and also old, archived articles. You only need to provide the root URL of the news website to crawl it completely. news-please combines the power of multiple state-of-the-art libraries and tools, such as [scrapy](https://scrapy.org/), [Newspaper](https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper), and [readability](https://github.com/buriy/python-readability). 



news-please also features a library mode, which allows Python developers to use the crawling and extraction functionality within their own program. Moreover, news-please allows to conveniently [crawl and extract articles](/newsplease/examples/commoncrawl.py) from the (very) large news archive at commoncrawl.org.



If you want to contribute to news-please, please first read [here](#contributions).



## Announcements

10/11/2023: If you're interested in **text annotation software**, check out [textada](https://textada.com/) - an AI-powered text annotation tool. Add your documents and categories, do some manual annotations, and let the AI do the work for you. The university-based project is not open source, but free to use.



03/23/2021: If you're interested in **sentiment classification** in news articles, check out our large-scale dataset for target-dependent sentiment classification. We also publish an easy-to-use neural model that achieves state-of-the-art performance. Visit the project [here](https://github.com/fhamborg/NewsMTSC).



06/01/2018: If you're interested in **event extraction** from news, you might also want to check out our new project, [Giveme5W1H](https://github.com/fhamborg/Giveme5W1H) - a tool that extracts phrases answering the journalistic five W and one H questions to describe an article's main event, i.e., who did what, when, where, why, and how.



## Extracted information

news-please extracts the following attributes from news articles. An examplary json file as extracted by news-please can be found [here](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/blob/master/newsplease/examples/sample.json).

* headline

* lead paragraph

* main text

* main image

* name(s) of author(s)

* publication date

* language



## Features

* **works out of the box**: install with pip, add URLs of your pages, run :-)

* run news-please conveniently using its [**CLI**](#run-the-crawler-via-the-cli) mode

* use it as a [**library**](#use-within-your-own-code-as-a-library) within your own software

* extract articles from [**commoncrawl.org's news archive**](#news-archive-from-commoncrawlorg)



### Modes and use cases

news-please supports three main use cases, which are explained in more detail in the following.



#### CLI mode

* stores extracted results in JSON files, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, or your own storage

* simple but extensive configuration (if you want to tweak the results)

* revisions: crawl articles multiple times and track changes



#### Library mode

* crawl and extract information given a list of article URLs

* to use news-please within your own Python code



#### News archive from commoncrawl.org

* commoncrawl.org provides an extensive, free-to-use archive of news articles from small and major publishers world wide

* news-please enables users to conveniently download and extract articles from commoncrawl.org

* you can optionally define filter criteria, such as news publisher(s) or the date period, within which articles need to be published

* clone the news-please repository, adapt the config section in [newsplease/examples/commoncrawl.py](/newsplease/examples/commoncrawl.py), and execute `python3 -m newsplease.examples.commoncrawl`



## Getting started

It's super easy, we promise!



### Installation

news-please runs on Python 3.5+.

```

$ pip3 install news-please

```



### Use within your own code (as a library)

You can access the core functionality of news-please, i.e. extraction of semi-structured information from one or more news articles, in your own code by using news-please in library mode. If you want to use news-please's full website extraction (given only the root URL) or continuous crawling mode (using RSS), you'll need to use the CLI mode, which is described later.

```python

from newsplease import NewsPlease

article = NewsPlease.from_url('https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/us/politics/cpac-stephen-bannon-reince-priebus.html?hp')

print(article.title)

```

A sample of an extracted article can be found [here (as a JSON file)](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/blob/master/newsplease/examples/sample.json).



If you want to crawl multiple articles at a time, optionally with a timeout in seconds

```python

NewsPlease.from_urls([url1, url2, ...], timeout=6)

```

or if you have a file containing all URLs (each line containing a single URL)

```python

NewsPlease.from_file(path)

```

or if you have raw HTML data (you can also provide the original URL to increase the accuracy of extracting the publishing date)

```python

NewsPlease.from_html(html, url=None)

```

or if you have a [WARC file](https://github.com/webrecorder/warcio) (also check out our [commoncrawl workflow](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/blob/master/newsplease/examples/commoncrawl.py), which provides convenient methods to filter commoncrawl's archive for specific news outlets and dates)

```python

NewsPlease.from_warc(warc_record)

```

In library mode, news-please will attempt to download and extract information from each URL. The previously described functions are blocking, i.e., will return once news-please has attempted all URLs. The resulting list contains all successfully extracted articles.



Finally, you can process the extracted information contained in the article object(s). For example, to export into a JSON format, you may use:



```python

import json



with open("article.json", "w") as file:

    json.dump(article.get_serializable_dict(), file)

```



### Run the crawler (via the CLI)



```

$ news-please

```



news-please will then start crawling a few examples pages. To terminate the process press `CTRL+C`. news-please will then shut down within 5-60 seconds. You can also press `CTRL+C` twice, which will immediately kill the process (not recommended, though).



The results are stored by default in JSON files in the `data` folder. In the default configuration, news-please also stores the original HTML files.



### Crawl other pages



Most likely, you will not want to crawl from the websites provided in our example configuration. Simply head over to the [`sitelist.hjson`](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/wiki/user-guide#sitelisthjson) file and add the root URLs of the news outlets' web pages of your choice. news-please also can extract the most recent events from the [GDELT project](https://www.gdeltproject.org/), see [here](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/blob/master/newsplease/crawler/spiders/gdelt_crawler.py).



### ElasticSearch



news-please also supports export to ElasticSearch. Using Elasticsearch will also enable the versioning feature. First, enable it in the [`config.cfg`](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/wiki/configuration) at the config directory, which is by default `~/news-please/config` but can also be changed with the `-c` parameter to a custom location. In case the directory does not exist, a default directory will be created at the specified location.



    [Scrapy]



    ITEM_PIPELINES = {

                       'newsplease.pipeline.pipelines.ArticleMasterExtractor':100,

                       'newsplease.pipeline.pipelines.ElasticsearchStorage':350

                     }



That's it! Except, if your Elasticsearch database is not located at `http://localhost:9200`, uses a different username/password or CA-certificate authentication. In these cases, you will also need to change the following.



    [Elasticsearch]



    host = localhost

    port = 9200    



    ...



    # Credentials used  for authentication (supports CA-certificates):



    use_ca_certificates = False           # True if authentification needs to be performed

    ca_cert_path = '/path/to/cacert.pem'  

    client_cert_path = '/path/to/client_cert.pem'  

    client_key_path = '/path/to/client_key.pem'  

    username = 'root'  

    secret = 'password'



### PostgreSQL

news-please allows for storing of articles to a PostgreSQL database, including the versioning feature. To export to PostgreSQL, open the corresponding config file (`config_lib.cfg` for library mode and `config.cfg` for CLI mode) and add the PostgresqlStorage module to the pipeline and adjust the database credentials:



    [Scrapy]

    ITEM_PIPELINES = {

                   'newsplease.pipeline.pipelines.ArticleMasterExtractor':100,

                   'newsplease.pipeline.pipelines.PostgresqlStorage':350

                 }



    [Postgresql]

    # Postgresql-Connection required for saving meta-informations

    host = localhost

    port = 5432

    database = 'news-please'

    user = 'user'

    password = 'password'



If you plan to use news-please and its export to PostgreSQL in a production environment, we recommend to uninstall the `psycopg2-binary` package and install `psycopg2`. We use the former since it does not require a C compiler in order to be installed. See [here](https://pypi.org/project/psycopg2-binary/), for more information on differences between `psycopg2` and `psycopg2-binary` and how to setup a production environment.



### What's next?

We have collected a bunch of useful information for both [users](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/wiki/user-guide)  and [developers](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/wiki/developer-guide). As a user, you will most likely only deal with two files: [`sitelist.hjson`](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/wiki/user-guide#sitelisthjson) (to define sites to be crawled) and [`config.cfg`](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/wiki/configuration) (probably only rarely, in case you want to tweak the configuration).



## Support (also, how to open an issue)

You can find more information on usage and development in our [wiki](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/wiki)! Before contacting us, please check out the wiki. If you still have questions on how to use news-please, please create a new [issue](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/issues) on GitHub. Please understand that we are not able to provide individual support via email. We think that help is more valuable if it is shared publicly so that more people can benefit from it. However, if you still require individual support, e.g., due to confidentiality of your project, we may be able to provide you with private consultation. Contact [us](mailto:[email protected]) for information about pricing and further details.



### Issues

For bug reports, we ask you to use the Bug report template. Make sure you're using the latest version of news-please, since we cannot give support for older versions. As described earlier, we cannot give support for issues or questions sent by email.



### Donation

Your donations are greatly appreciated! They will free us up to work on this project more, to take on tasks such as adding new features, bug-fix support, and addressing further concerns with the library. 



* [GitHub Sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors/fhamborg)

* [PayPal](https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=XX272QZV9A2FN&source=url)



## Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the contributions of the following students (ordered alphabetically):



* Moritz Bock

* Michael Fried

* Jonathan Hassler

* Markus Klatt

* Kevin Kress

* Sören Lachnit

* Marvin Pafla

* Franziska Schlor

* Matt Sharinghousen

* Claudio Spener

* Moritz Steinmaier



We also thank all other contributors, which you can find on the [contributors page](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/graphs/contributors)!



## How to cite

If you are using news-please, please cite our [paper](http://www.gipp.com/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/hamborg2017.pdf) ([ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314072045_news-please_A_Generic_News_Crawler_and_Extractor), [Mendeley](https://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/newsplease-generic-news-crawler-extractor/)):

```

@InProceedings{Hamborg2017,

  author     = {Hamborg, Felix and Meuschke, Norman and Breitinger, Corinna and Gipp, Bela},

  title      = {news-please: A Generic News Crawler and Extractor},

  year       = {2017},

  booktitle  = {Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium of Information Science},

  location   = {Berlin},

  doi        = {10.5281/zenodo.4120316},

  pages      = {218--223},

  month      = {March}

}

```

You can find more information on this and other news projects on our [website](https://felix.hamborg.eu/).



## Contributions

Do you want to contribute? Great, we are always happy for any support on this project! We are particularly looking for pull requests that fix [bugs](https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please/issues). We also welcome pull requests that contribute your own ideas. 



By contributing to this project, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the project's [license](#license).



### Pull requests

We love contributions by our users! If you plan to submit a pull request, please open an issue first and desribe the issue you want to fix or what you want to improve and how! This way, we can discuss whether your idea could be added to news-please in the first place and, if so, how it could best be implemented in order to fit into architecture and coding style. In the issue, please state that you're planning to implement the described features. 



### Custom features

Unfortunately, we do not have resources to implement features requested by users. Instead, we recommend that you implement features you need and if you'd like open a pull request here so that the community can benefit from your improvements, too.



## License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use news-please except in compliance with the License. A copy of the License is included in the project, see the file [LICENSE.txt](LICENSE.txt).



Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. The news-please logo is courtesy of [Mario Hamborg](https://mario.hamborg.eu/).



Copyright 2016-2023 The news-please team