bnetza-bk6-scraper 0.0.2

Scrapes documents of Bundesnetzagentur Beschlusskammer 6 into a structured, git-diffable mirror

bnetza_bk6_scraper

bnetza_bk6_scraper mirrors the documents published by the German Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA) Beschlusskammer 6 (BK6) into a structured, git-diffable directory tree. BK6 regulates electricity network access and is a constant source of consultations, rulings (Festlegungen) and their attachments. Because the agency publishes these as loose PDFs on HTML pages with no changelog, tracking what changed and when is painful. This tool discovers every BK6 proceeding, downloads its PDFs and a normalized HTML snapshot of each phase page, and records structured metadata. Committing the output to git turns every regulatory update into a reviewable diff.

Installation

pip install bnetza_bk6_scraper

Usage

The package installs a single console command, bnetza-bk6-scraper, with a mirror subcommand:

bnetza-bk6-scraper mirror --target <dir> [--concurrency N] [--year YYYY] [-v]

Option	Default	Description
--target	(required)	Output directory (the mirror repository root).
--concurrency	4	Number of parallel HTTP fetches.
--year	(all)	Restrict the run to a single year, e.g. 2023.
-v, --verbose	off	Enable debug logging.

Example — mirror only the 2023 proceedings into ./mirror:

bnetza-bk6-scraper mirror --target ./mirror --year 2023 -v

Each run logs a summary such as run summary: 7 proceedings, 16 documents written, 0 failures.

Output layout

Proceedings are written under /{year}/{aktenzeichen}/, with a top-level index.json listing every mirrored proceeding:

<target>/
├── index.json                          # summary of all proceedings
└── 2023/
    └── BK6-23-241/
        ├── metadata.json               # structured proceeding metadata
        ├── BK6-23-241_beschluss.html   # normalized HTML snapshot of a phase page
        ├── BK6-23-241_beschluss_vom_07.05.26.pdf
        ├── BK6-23-241_bilarem.pdf
        └── BK6-23-241_anlage_bilarem.pdf

• metadata.json captures the Aktenzeichen, year, title, status, Stand (last-modified date), any submission deadline (Frist), the phase pages, and one entry per document (title, type, source URL, filename).
• The normalized *.html files are trimmed, stable snapshots of the source phase pages so that content changes surface as small diffs.
• The PDFs are the proceeding's documents, downloaded verbatim.

Change detection is intentionally "dumb": the tool always writes the current state, and git diff in the mirror repository reveals what changed.

Mirror repository

The scraper is designed to feed a separate mirror repository, Hochfrequenz/bnetza_bk6_mirror. A scheduled GitHub Action there will periodically:

pip install bnetza_bk6_scraper
bnetza-bk6-scraper mirror --target .
git add -A && git commit -m "update BK6 mirror"

so that regulatory changes at BK6 become visible as reviewable git diffs and commit history. That Action is future work and does not live in this repository.

WAF / browser User-Agent

The BNetzA website sits behind a Web Application Firewall that rejects non-browser clients by serving a 200 OK "The requested URL was rejected" page instead of the real content. To get through, the scraper sends browser-like User-Agent and Accept headers and treats the rejection page as a retryable error. No credentials or API keys are required.

Contribute

This project uses tox for all quality gates. Create a one-shot development environment with everything installed:

tox -e dev

Individual gates: tox -e tests, tox -e linting, tox -e type_check, tox -e coverage, and tox -e spell_check. Run the full suite with tox.