fetch-hackernews

A simple program to fetch Hackernews from news.ycombinator.com written in Python.

I know, there are already some similar projects via PyPi available, but I said to myself, why not add one more app 😉 It gave me the opportunity to finally deal with the subject of web scraping (with BeautifulSoup).

Operating System

macOS, Linux and Windows

Requirements

• Python >= 3.12
• requests
• beautifulsoup4

Install

$ pip3 install fetch_hackernews

Usage

Start the program with following command:

$ fetch_hackernews

This shows you the 30 most recent messages. The output looks similar to the one shown below:

Found no local index.html file.
Fetch data from https://news.ycombinator.com…

##############################
#                            #
#      Fetch Hacker News     #
#       Version: 1.0.7       #
#                            #
##############################

1 - Red Light Green Light
Link: https://jamessevedge.com/articles/red-light-green-light/

2 - You can now send replies from your Duck Addresses
Link: https://duckduckgo.com/email/faq
…

After running this program, an index.html file is created locally. This reduces requests to the server from news.ycombinator.com.

So, all news will be read from the local index.html file. This program will search for such a file. If no file has been created yet, it will create this file, download the content (using requests) and save it. After that, the content will be parsed using BeautifulSoup.

By default, the index.html file is only updated every six hours.

The index.html file is stored in the following directory (macOS):

~/.config/hackernews

Changelog

see Changelog.md