Company
Date Published
Author
Bob Belderbos
Word count
1382
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In this detailed guide, the author explains how to build an automated system that scrapes dynamically generated HTML content from Packt's Free Learning page using Selenium, operates without opening a browser in headless mode, and posts updates to Slack and Twitter. The process involves deploying the script on Heroku, utilizing buildpacks to install necessary Chrome and Chromedriver binaries, and setting environment variables for seamless operation. Further automation is achieved by using Heroku's Scheduler addon to post daily updates automatically. The guide also covers setting up API integrations with Twitter and Slack for autoposting, facilitated by libraries like Tweepy and Requests, and provides a command-line interface using argparse for flexible script execution. This project not only addresses the need to keep a Slack community informed about daily free resources but also serves as an educational exercise in web scraping, cloud deployment, and API integration.