Maple Lobbying Scraper

Standalone client to scrape lobbyist disclosure pages from www.sec.state.ma.us/LobbyistPublicSearch/ and upload them to a postgres database

Local Docker

The docker-compose.yml file configures a postgres database and a python container for the scraper.

Note that the container runs as root and will change the file permissions on the files it writes. You can run sudo chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) . to reset permissions.

1. Install docker and docker compose v2.
2. Build the images with docker compose build
3. Start the services with docker compose up -d. This will return once they're up.
4. Open a shell into the python container with docker compose exec lobby bash. This gives you a terminal into the development environment, connected to your source directory. So this will reflect changes you make.
5. Run your scraper commands poetry run python main.py
6. Shut down the services: docker compose down. Add -v to also delete the database

Generate lobbying view

Put credentials for the postgres database into .env. The credentials for the cloud database are stored in the aws console:

DB_HOST="localhost"
DB_PORT="5432"
DB_USER="postgres"
DB_PASSWORD="password"
DB_NAME="lobbying"

Then run this command to create a parquet file with the contents of the table.

poetry run python dump_lobbying_site_view.py --format json lobbying_view.json.zip