cheapdublinrent.guru

cheapdublinrent.guru began as a hobby project while I was studying for Amazon Web Services' Associate Solutions Architect certificate. Since then I have received my certification and, due to a handful of external factors, have decided not to move ahead with rental-property web-scraping as a long-term project.

Its primary goal was as a proof-of-concept site, demonstrating a simple static-site architecture which accomodated for its data to be updated throughout the day, in turn availing of the instant-scalability and extremely low cost of AWS Lambda and S3 static-site-hosting.

Architecture

1. Data is scraped using an AWS Lambda function and the python library BeautifulSoup.
2. The same Lambda function then updates a .json file which holds relevant data for each property listing. Each key in the .json file has a 'price' value which can be referenced when updating the file. This .json file is stored in an AWS S3 bucket and accessed using the Python interface Boto.
3. This lambda function can be scheduled to run on at set times using a cron expression.
4. On the Front End, a Bootstrap website - hosted via AWS Route 53 and S3 - uses jQuery to pull from the .json file and populate the site with the contents of this JSON file.

This project's GitHub repo is viewable here.