freecycle

A scraper for Freecycle.

Installation

You can install the scraper via NPM or yarn.

npm install --save freecycle

Usage

Import freecycle into your project to begin scraping. You can use the getPosts method to retrieve latest posts from a specified Freecycle group.

const freecycle = require('freecycle')
const GROUP_NAME = 'CambridgeUK'

freecycle.getPosts(GROUP_NAME, (err, posts) => {
  if (err) {
    return console.err('Could not retrieve posts', err)
  }
  posts.forEach(post => {
    console.log('Post: ', post.name)
  })
})

The posts array is an array of objects with the following string fields:

{
  name,
  url,
  location
}

More detail about each post can be retrieved using the getPostById and getPostByURL functions. Passing the url field (from an array item returned by the getPosts method) into getPostByURL is the easiest way to retrieve further information about a post.

freecycle.getPostById(GROUP_NAME, '73086860', (err, post) => {
  if (err) {
    return console.err('Could not retrieve post details', err)
  }
  console.log('Post: ', post.title, post.description)
})

The post object, returned by either getPostBy function, contains the following string fields:

{
  id,
  type,
  title,
  location,
  date,
  description,
  image,
}

The image field is undefined or the URL of the post image.

Groups

There is also a Group object, available by importing freecycle/group. This abstracts the notion of an individual Freecycle group and allows multiple to be queried independently.

const Group = require('freecycle/group')
const group = new Group('CambridgeUK')

group.getPosts((err, posts) => {
  if (err) {
    return console.error(err)
  }
  console.log(posts)
})

See the 'multi.js' example for more details.

License

MIT