"A course list which doesn't suck."

A front-end API for William and Mary's course list system.

In addition to the GPL, the license for this open-source API now mandates that all derivative works do not scrape W&M's courselist more than once every five minutes. This is because the website is very weak, and the scraping function pb.scrapeCourselist() puts noticeable strain on it.

$ python3 -Biq
>>> import pennant.backend as pb
>>> rawHtml = pb.scrapeCourselist()
>>> courses = pb.parseToCourseList(pb.parseHtml(rawHtml))
>>> for course in courses[:3]:
...     print(course.fullinfo())
...
Black Speculative Arts w/ Prof. Sanford
    OPEN (AFST 150-01, CRN 29786)
    Tuesday, Thursday from 12:30 PM to 01:50 PM
    fulfills no GERs
    3 credits: FRSM

Black&White in American Drama w/ Prof. Weiss
    OPEN (AFST 150W-01, CRN 30028)
    Tuesday, Thursday from 09:30 AM to 10:50 AM
    fulfills no GERs
    4 credits: FRSM, LDWR

Intro to Africana Studies w/ Prof. Osiapem
    OPEN (AFST 205-01, CRN 29007)
    Monday, Wednesday from 03:30 PM to 04:50 PM
    fulfills GER 4C, 5
    3 credits

>>> print(courses[0].title, "is", "open" if courses[0].isOpen else "closed")
Black Speculative Arts is open
>>> "Thursday" in courses[0].days
True
>>>

To set up a server, you need a linux system with the following installed:

Python >= 3.0
Django 1.6
mod_wsgi
gunicorn

To install these, use your system's package manager, with the exception of gunicorn. To install gunicorn, simply use:

pip3 install gunicorn

Next, clone this repository to wm:

git clone https://github.com/wm-pennant/pennant.git wm

Your directory structure should look like this:

wm
|____pennant
|
|____wm
|
|____manage.py
|
|____(other files)

In order to have data to read, you need to run the scraper script as follows:

python3 quickfetch.py

Note: The above script calls scrapeCourselist(), so do not call it more than once every five minutes.

Finally, to start the server, issue this command in the same directory as manage.py:

gunicorn wm.wsgi:application

Note: If you cannot connect to your server, try running it with:

gunicorn -b 0.0.0.0:80 wm.wsgi:application

(May require root access to bind to port 80)

Please carefully read the license, which has recently changed.

This API uses only REST queries and does nothing you couldn't do with a browser.