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Adding a comic to Dosage

To add a new comic to a local dosage installation, drop a python file into Dosage's "user plugin directory" - If you don't know where that is, run dosage --help, the directory will be shown at the end.

Here is a complete example which is explained in detail below. Dosage provides different base classes for parsing comic pages, but this tutorial only covers the modern ParserScraper base class, which uses an HTML parser (LXML/libxml) to find on each pages's DOM.

from ..scraper import ParserScraper

class SuperDuperComic(ParserScraper):
    url = 'https://superdupercomic.com/'
    stripUrl = url + 'comics/%s'
    firstStripUrl = stripUrl % '1'
    imageSearch = '//div[d:class("comicpane")]//img'
    prevSearch = '//a[@rel="prev"]'
    help = 'Index format: n (unpadded)'

Let's look at each line in detail.

class SuperDuperComic(ParserScraper):

All comic plugin classes inherit from ParserScraper. The class name (SuperDuperComic in our example) must be unique, regardless of upper/lower characters. The user finds comics with this class name, so be sure to select something descriptive and easy to remember.

url = 'https://superdupercomic.com/'

The URL must display the latest comic picture. This is where the comic image search will start. See below for some special cases.

stripUrl = url + 'comics/%s'

This defines how a comic strip URL looks like. In our example, all comic strip URLs look like https://superdupercomic.com/comics/NNN where NNN is the increasing comic number.

firstStripUrl = stripUrl % '1'

This tells Dosage what the earliest comic strip URL looks like. Dosage stops searching for more comics when it is encounterd. In our example comic numbering starts with 1, so the oldest comic URL is https://superdupercomic.com/comics/1

imageSearch = '//div[d:class("comicpane")]//img'

Each comic page URL has one or more comic strip images. The imageSearch defines an XPath expression to find the comic strip image inside each page. Most of the time you can use your browser's console (Open with F12) to experiment on the real page. Dosage adds a custom XPath function (d:class) to make it easier to match HTML classes.

prevSearch = '//a[@rel="prev"]'

To search for more comics, Dosage has to look for the previous comic URL. This property defines an XPath expression to find a link to the previous comic page.

help = 'Index format: n (unpadded)'

Since the user can search comics from a given start point, the help can describe how the comic is numbered. Running dosage superdupercomic:100 would start getting comics from number 100 and earlier.

Contribute a module to dosage

If you don't know how to use git and/or setup a Python development environment, that's fine! You can create an issue on GitHub and paste the source of your new module into it and a Dosage developer will take care of integrating the module into Dosage.

Otherwise, integrate your new comic module into in one of the *.py files in the dosagelib/plugins module.

The files in dosagelib/plugins and the classes inside those files are sorted alphabetically. Add your comic to the appropriate filename. For example if the comic name is "Super duper comic", the new class should be added to dosagelib/plugins/s.py.