🌍 Purpose & Functionality

The Heise News Crawler is designed to automatically extract and store news articles from Heise's archive. The primary goals are:

• 📡 Data Collection: Gather historical news articles from Heise.de.
• 🏛 Structured Storage: Store articles in a PostgreSQL database for easy querying and analysis.
• 🔍 Metadata Extraction: Retrieve key information such as title, author, category, keywords, and word count.
• 🔄 Incremental crawling: Detect duplicate articles and save only new articles of the current day.
• 🔔 Notifications: Send an email if an error occurs during the crawling process.
• 🎨 Enhanced Terminal Output: Uses PyFiglet for improved readability.
• 📤 Data export: Export of articles as .csv, .json, .xlsx-file or display the data in a stats.html file
• 🖥 API: Provision of statistics and complete data sets.

Also an API endpoint is provided that can display the crawled data and statistics.

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🚀 Installation & Setup

1️⃣ Requirements

🔹 Python 3

🔹 PostgreSQL

🔹 Required Python Libraries (Dependencies in requirements.txt)

2️⃣ Install Dependencies

Install required Python libraries:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

3️⃣ Create .env File

Set up your database and email credentials by creating a .env file:

EMAIL_USER=...
EMAIL_PASSWORD=...
SMTP_SERVER=...
SMTP_PORT=...
ALERT_EMAIL=...
DB_NAME=...
DB_USER=...
DB_PASSWORD=...
DB_HOST=...
DB_PORT=...
DISCORD_TOKEN=...
CHANNEL_ID=...

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🛠 Usage

1️⃣ Start the first Crawler (into the past)

python3 main.py

Example Terminal Output

[INFO] Crawle URL: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/archiv/xxxx/xx
[INFO] Gefundene Artikel (insgesamt): 55
xxxx-xx-xx xx:xx:xx [INFO] Verarbeite 16 Artikel für den Tag xxxx-xx-xx
xxxx-xx-xx xx:xx:xx [INFO] 2025-03-01T20:00:00 - article-name
(⬆️ date)

If fewer than 10 items are found per day, an e-mail will be sent

2️⃣ Start the second Crawler (for current articles in the present)

python3 current_crawler.py

Example Terminal Output

[INFO] Crawle URL: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/archiv/xxxx/xx
[INFO] Gefundene Artikel (insgesamt): 55
xxxx-xx-xx xx:xx:xx [INFO] Aktueller Crawl-Durchlauf abgeschlossen.
xxxx-xx-xx xx:xx:xx [INFO] Warte 300 Sekunden bis zum nächsten Crawl.
(⬆️ date)

3️⃣ Use API

The API server starts automatically. You can call up the statistics here:

http://127.0.0.1:6600/stats

4️⃣ Export articles

You can export the data for each item to a CSV, JSON or XLSX file.

python3 export_articles.py

Exported articles are saved in the current directory.

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🏗 Database Schema

Column	Type	Description
id	SERIAL	Unique ID
title	TEXT	Article title
url	TEXT	Article URL (unique)
date	TEXT	Publication date
author	TEXT	Author(s)
category	TEXT	Category
keywords	TEXT	Keywords
word_count	INT	Word count
editor_abbr	TEXT	Editor abbreviation
site_name	TEXT	Website name

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📩 Error Notifications

If any errors occur, an email notification will be sent.

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📂 Project Structure

📂 Heise-News-Crawler
├── 📄 .gitignore                 # Git ignore file
├── 📄 .env                       # Environment variables (email & database config, you have to create this file manually)
├── 📄 main.py                    # Main crawler script
├── 📄 api.py                     # API functionalities
├── 📄 notification.py            # Email notification handler
├── 📄 test_notifications.py      # Testing email notifications
├── 📄 README.md                  
├── 📄 current_crawler.py         # Crawler for newer articles
├── 📄 export_articles.py         # Function to export the data
├── 📄 requirements.txt           
└── 📂 templates/                 # HTML email templates
    ├── 📄 stats.html             # API functionalities
└── 📂 data/                      # Export data (as of 03/03/2025)
    ├── 📄 .gitattributes         
    ├── 📄 README.md
    ├── 📄 api.py             
    ├── 📄 articles_export.csv
    ├── 📄 articles_export.json
    ├── 📄 articles_export.xlsx
└── 📄 LICENCE  

❗Troubleshooting

🌐 Start API manually

python3 api.py

📧 Testing Notifications

python3 test_notification.py

⚠️ Found an error?

Please create a pull request or contact us via server@schächner.de

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🗂️ Examples

(with Tableu and DeepNote, status March 2025)

Deepnote:

We have also generated some graphs with Deepnote (❗ only with Random 10.000 rows ❗)

Check out also the data/Datamining_Heise web crawler-3.twb-file with an excerpt of analyses.

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📜 License

This program is licensed under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

🙋 About us

This project was programmed by both of us within a few days and is constantly being further developed:

• https://github.com/schBenedikt
• https://github.com/schVinzenz

📬 Contact

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hi!

📧 Email: server@schächner.de

🌐 Website:

• https://technik.schächner.de
• https://benedikt.schächner.de
• https://vinzenz.schächner.de

💖 Special Thanks

The idea for our Heise News Crawler comes from David Kriesel and his presentation “Spiegel Mining” at 33c3.

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Happy Crawling! 🎉