insider 0.1

Transaction-tracking application for Django

Insider is a transaction-tracking application written in Python using the Django framework.

Install

Download

Insider is published as a Git repository. See insider’s web interface for more information.

Dependencies

Outside of Django and the Python standard libraries, the only required dependency is django-tables2 (docs). For some of the scraping libraries (insider/scrape/*), you’ll also need BeautifulSoup.

Quick-start

If you don’t have a Django project and you just want to run insider as a stand-alone service, you can use the example project written up in example. Set up the project (once):

$ python example/manage.py syncdb

See the Django documentation for more details.

Run

Run the app on your local host (as many times as you like):

$ python example/manage.py runserver

You may need to add the current directory to PYTHONPATH so python can find the insider package. If you’re running bash, that will look like

$ PYTHONPATH=”.:$PYTHONPATH” python example/manage.py runserver

Scraping

Entering transaction data by hand can be tedious and error prone. To automate the task, you should write scrapers to look up and enter transaction data automatically. To get you started, I’ve written insider/scrape/nasdaq.py, which scrapes NASDAQ’s interface to EDGAR's data. Use the scraper with something like:

$ export PYTHONPATH='.'
$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='example.settings'
$ python insider/scrape/nasdaq.py NYSE:RHT NASDAQ:GOOG

If the scraper doesn’t extract company names (nasdaq.py does not), it’s probably a good idea to add the relevant Company and Ticker to the database before running the scraper. Otherwise you may get tickers from several echanges all pointing to the company UNKNOWN.

Hacking

This project was largely build following the Django tutorial. That’s a good place to start if you’re new to Django.