Harvard Law School

[TylerVigen]

Hi there!

I run HLSDope.org. We already have most of the student body (~1400 of the ~1900 students) using the site, but right now our casebook swapper is sub-par.

I want to integrate the bookswap project. Our campus uses bncollege, which makes this project particularly alluring. However, I have a few questions:

1. What is the proper cron syntax? We usually use "lynx -source /path/to/cron.php" to execute cron commands. I don't quite understand "/path/to/index.php" in cron execution and can't find documentation explain this.
2. Does the bncollege scraper still work? The other github scrapers I have found seem to be failing, and I can't tell if the NU one works.

Thanks!
Tyler

[eromba]

Thanks for your interest in the project. To address your questions:

1. BookSwap's cron tasks are implemented using CodeIgniter's built-in CLI functionality. The "/path/to/index.php" described in the wiki is the path to your BookSwap site's index.php file on your web server.
2. I have not tested the BNCollege scraper in quite a while. I know that BNCollege redesigned their campus bookstore sites after the scraper was originally built, but from what I can tell, the JSON API for loading textbook data remains the same, so the scraper should work. Give it a try, and if you run into any problems, please log an issue in the issue queue.

As you evaluate existing GitHub projects to leverage for HLSDope.org, please keep in mind that BookSwap is no longer being actively maintained. Hopefully you will find portions of the codebase useful, but there is no timeline for new features or bug fixes. With that said, if you have any improvements that you would like to share, please don't hesitate to submit a pull request.