Hacker News Web Scraping

A CLI app that allows users to scrape news stories from Hacker News

Installation Instructions

• git clone https://github.com/DanThomp507/Hacker-News-Scraper-Test.git
• cd into project directory
• run npm run install-hacker

How to Run

• After installation, all you have to do is type hackernews -p [page number] in your terminal (in the root directory)
• Running these commands will return the requested page number in the console
• Each page contains 30 posts
• You can also run hackernews --help for automated help

Libraries Used and Why

• Axios: a Javascript library that is used to make HTTP requests from Node.js. I used Axios because it parses JSON responses and supports promises by default. It is also easy-to-use and improves efficiency.
• Cheerio: an implementation of a subset of JQuery designed for the server. I used Cheerio because it allowed me to work with downloaded data as opposed to parsing through it. It improves efficiency and is easy-to-use.
• Commander.js, a command line library for Node.js. I used Commander.js to run the program from the command line. Its clean syntax and auto-generated help are particularly beneficial.