versiontracker 2.1.3.20180428

Web scrapping software to keep track of the latest stable version of different software.

Version Tracker is a project that provides both a command-line tool and a Python library to query the latest stable versions of different software products using web scrapping.

For example:

$ versiontracker vlc
vlc: 2.2.2 (2016-07-06) @ http://get.videolan.org/vlc/

It is currently being used to detect obsolete packages in Chakra [1] and to feed updated software version information to Wikidata [2].

[1]

chakraversiontracker

[2]

Shyde

Requirements

Version Tracker requires Python 3 and the following Python packages:

• python-dateutil

• pyxdg

• Scrapy

• termcolor

To build the offline documentation, you also need:

• sphinx-argparse

Installation

Use pip to install:

pip install versiontracker

Basic Command-Line Usage

To use the versiontracker command-line application pass it a list of software IDs:

$ versiontracker vlc xfce
vlc: 2.2.2 (2016-07-06) @ http://get.videolan.org/vlc/
xfce: 4.12 (2015-02-28) @ http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/

You can use the -l option to get a list of supported software IDs:

$ versiontracker -l
0ad
4kslideshowmaker
…

Basic Library Usage

Use version_info() to get information about the latest stable version of a single product:

>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> from versiontracker import version_info
>>> pprint(version_info('vlc'))
{'id': 'vlc',
 'date': datetime.datetime(2016, 7, 6, 10, 10),
 'url': 'http://get.videolan.org/vlc/',
 'version': '2.2.2'}

Use iter_version_info() to iterate through the version information of several products:

>>> from versiontracker import iter_version_info
>>> for version_data in iter_version_info(('vlc', 'xfce')):
...     pprint(version_data)
...
{'id': 'vlc',
 'date': datetime.datetime(2016, 7, 6, 10, 10),
 'url': 'http://get.videolan.org/vlc/',
 'version': '2.2.2'}
{'id': 'xfce',
 'date': datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 28, 21, 7),
 'url': 'http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/',
 'version': '4.12'}

Use supported_software() to get a list of supported software IDs:

>>> from versiontracker import supported_software
>>> supported_software()
['kde-l10n-ca', 'kdiamond', 'kontactinterface', 'entropy', …]

Documentation

See the complete documentation at Read the Docs.