gae-livescore

gae-livescore is a Google App Engine application that takes football score details from http://www.livescore.com and makes the data available to clients in JSON format.

It fetches details of current/upcoming matches and stores them in a database and updates the database after a particular time interval. Only matches of whitelisted competitions listed in whitelist database are tracked. This is to keep resource usage in appspot within the daily free quota limits.

Legality

Usage of the application is completely legal. The FAQ of livescore.com (http://www.livescore.com/FAQ.htm) states:

(e-03) Can I copy live score data from your website for my/our own website or other use ?

• There is no such law that would prevent you from doing so, live score data can't be copyrighted as any live score data are factual information and not an invention or intellectual work of somebody. With that in mind however, we do have a mechanism in place to detect and block anybody who would try to copy our content by an automated system, being it crawler, spider or any other automated software.

Configuration before deployment

There are a few bits one can configure before deploying the application.

1. Frequency of updates

Updates are run as cron jobs. Update the cron.yaml appropriately to adjust frequency of updates.

Deployment

1. Clone Livescore-Api:

   $git clone [email protected]:rr0hit/gae-livescore.git
   

2. Register your application at appspot.com

3. Install App Engine Python SDK. (http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html)

4. Rename the git directory to the application (for eg. MyApp) name you registered:

   $mv -R gae-livescore MyApp
   

5. Remove the unwanted files:

   $rm -R MyApp/.git README.rst TODO LICENSE
   

6. Replace the application name in app.yaml:

   $sed  s/gae-livescore/MyApp/ MyApp/app.yaml > MyApp/app.yaml
   

7. Deploy the app:

   $appcfg.py update MyApp
   

Configuration after deployment

1. You have to set the whitelist, consisting of livescore.com page url and competition names. This can be done by logging in as aministrator and filling the form at MyApp.appspot.com/admin where further explaination can be found.

The contents of whitelist database can be viewed/deleted from Appspot dashboard > datastore viewer.

Client End Usage Example in Python

1. All Mathches query:

   >>> from urllib2 import urlopen
   >>> import json
   >>> html=urlopen("http://MyApp.appspot.com/allmatches")
   >>> a=json.load(html)
   >>> for m in a:
   ...     print m['time']+" "+m['home_side']+" "+m['score']+" "+m['away_side']
   ...
   19:45 Bury ? - ? Hartlepool U.
   19:45 Macclesfield T. ? - ? Plymouth Argyle
    53' Elfsborg 0 - 0 Falkenbergs FF
   19:45 Rochdale ? - ? Notts County
   19:45 Morecambe ? - ? Dagenham & R'bridge
   19:45 Barnet ? - ? Bradford C.
   19:45 Gillingham ? - ? Hereford U.
   FT CD Chivas USA 0 - 2 AIK Stockholm
   19:45 Oldham Athletic ? - ? Colchester U.
   19:45 Swindon T. ? - ? Burton
   19:45 Stevenage ? - ? Huddersfield T.
   FT San Jose E'quakes 1 - 1 Portland Timbers
   19:45 Chesterfield ? - ? Charlton Athletic
   19:45 Port Vale ? - ? Crewe Alexandra

2. "By teams" query:

   >>> html=urlopen("http://MyApp.appspot.com/byteams?teams=Burton,Gillingham")
   >>> a=json.load(html)
   >>> for m in a:
   ...     print m['time']+" "+m['home_side']+" "+m['score']+" "+m['away_side']
   ...
   19:45 Swindon T. ? - ? Burton
   19:45 Gillingham ? - ? Hereford U.

3. "By Competitions" query:

   >>> html=urlopen("http://MyApp.appspot.com/bycompetitions?competitions=England%20-%20League%20Two,England%20-%20League%20One")
   >>> a=json.load(html)
   >>> for m in a:
   ...     print m['time']+" "+m['home_side']+" "+m['score']+" "+m['away_side']...
   19:45 Morecambe ? - ? Dagenham & R'bridge
   19:45 Barnet ? - ? Bradford C.
   19:45 Swindon T. ? - ? Burton
   19:45 Port Vale ? - ? Crewe Alexandra
   19:45 Gillingham ? - ? Hereford U.
   19:45 Macclesfield T. ? - ? Plymouth Argyle
   19:45 Stevenage ? - ? Huddersfield T.
   19:45 Bury ? - ? Hartlepool U.
   19:45 Chesterfield ? - ? Charlton Athletic
   19:45 Rochdale ? - ? Notts County
   19:45 Oldham Athletic ? - ? Colchester U.

The data parsed also contains a few more fields. Each query as seen above consists of an array of dictionaries corresponding to individual matches. Each match dict consists of indices 'home_team', 'away_team', 'score', 'competition', 'time' and 'date' which are strings. There are two additional indices 'finished' and 'live' which are boolean values representing whether match is finished or ongoing.

LICENSE

This software is licensed under GPL v3. See LICENSE file for details.