Scapeshift is a webscraper rubygem designed for the Magic: The Gathering Oracle "Gatherer" card index. Since Wizards doesn't want to make an API for this system for various reasons, I've gone ahead and made a pseudo-API here.
Scapeshift uses the delightful Nokogiri gem to parse and scrape the various Oracle pages, generating (most commonly) a SortedSet of Scapeshift::Card objects containing the card data. In the case of expansion sets, formats, etc. Scapeshift returns a SortedSet of strings.
Usage is as simple as can be:
# Grab the complete list of expansion sets
@sets = Scapeshift::Crawler.crawl :meta, :type => :sets
# Grab the card set for an expansion
@alara_cards = Scapeshift::Crawler.crawl :cards, :set => 'Shards of Alara'
# Grab a single named card
@card = Scapeshift::Crawler.crawl :single, :name => 'Counterspell'
This gem uses Bundler to manage its dependencies for development:
$ sudo gem install bundler
$ cd /path/to/scapeshift
$ bundle install
Bundler is unlike Rubygems in that it doesn't automagically handle load paths for you. To make stuff work, you will need to start a subshell with
$ bundle exec bash
Replacing bash with the shell of your choice, of course.
This gem's tests use fakeweb to mock HTTP connections and speed things up. To run the tests you must first run:
rake fakeweb:update
This will download the content of the urls needed in tests (and specified in test/fakeweb.urls) and store them in
local files for quick access.
Then to run the tests just run
rake
If you write a test that opens up a new URL the test will automatically fail because FakeWeb is configured to not allow
actual HTTP connections to open and the new URL is not configured for the cache. To do this just add the new URL in the
test/fakeweb.urls file and update the caches with rake fakeweb:update.
This gem uses Yardoc syntax for documentation. You can generate these docs
with rake yard. Point any webserver at the docs/ directory to browse.
Simple, with Thin:
$ cd /path/to/scapeshift
$ rake yard
$ cd docs/
$ thin -A file -d start
Copyright (c) 2010 Josh Lindsey. See LICENSE for details.