README.md

hacker-news-to-sqlite

Create a SQLite database containing data fetched from Hacker News.

How to install

$ pip install hacker-news-to-sqlite

Usage

$ hacker-news-to-sqlite user hacker-news.db your-username
Importing items:  37%|███████████                        | 845/2297 [05:09<11:02,  2.19it/s]

Imports all of your Hacker News submissions and comments into a SQLite database called hacker-news.db.

$ hacker-news-to-sqlite trees hacker-news.db 22640038 22643218

Fetches the entire comments tree in which any of those content IDs appears.

Browsing your data with Datasette

You can use Datasette to browse your data. Install Datasette like this:

$ pip install datasette

Now run it against your hacker-news.db file like so:

$ datasette hacker-news.db

Visit https://localhost:8001/ to search and explore your data.

You can improve the display of your data usinng the datasette-render-timestamps and datasette-render-html plugins. Install them like this:

$ pip install datasette-render-timestamps datasette-render-html

Now save the following configuration in a file called metadata.json:

{
    "databases": {
        "hacker-news": {
            "tables": {
                "items": {
                    "plugins": {
                        "datasette-render-html": {
                            "columns": [
                                "text"
                            ]
                        },
                        "datasette-render-timestamps": {
                            "columns": [
                                "time"
                            ]
                        }
                    }
                },
                "users": {
                    "plugins": {
                        "datasette-render-timestamps": {
                            "columns": [
                                "created"
                            ]
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Run Datasette like this:

$ datasette -m metadata.json hacker-news.db

The timestamp columns will now be rendered as human-readable dates, and any HTML in your posts will be displayed as rendered HTML.