Craigslist Auto Search

What it does

Craigslist.com does not allow for product searches for all cities. For higher priced items such as automobiles, users may want to search without a location constraint. Alternative solutions exist already, however none which allow for 'advanced search' (such as specifying condition, fuel type, list price, miles, etc.). This project attempts to address that.

Initially, I intended to use Scrapy but after discovering that Craigslist URLs are formulaic and the query strings consistent and predictable, the only libraries needed for the scraping are requests and lxml. The front end UI is done in Angular4 although right now the page is basically just raw HTML/CSS. Django was intended to be used as the backend framework, but as this project was started late (I began on another project but the group left and I chose to get some Zs), the backend development has not started, nor is the front end complete. At the time of submission, only the crawler is functioning. :-(

Challenges I ran into

Desperate need of Zs

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The crawler works and has a decent runtime (limited by the time.sleeps inserted to not overload requests).

What's next for Craigslist Auto Search

Doing the Django. Increasing product searches beyond just automobiles. Making the front end 'user friendly' and (insert ux buzzwords)

Built With

• angular4
• passion
• python