Linkedin Automation:

Uses: Scrapy, Selenium web driver, Chromium headless, docker and python3.

Linkedin spider:

The first spider aims to visit as more linkedin's user pages as possible :-D, the objective is to gain visibility with your account: since LinkedIn notifies the issued User when someone visits his page.

Companies spider:

This spider aims to collect all the users working for a company on linkedin.

1. It goes on the company's front-page;
2. Clicks on "See all 1M employees" button;
3. Starts collecting User related Scapy items.

Install

Needed:

• docker;
• docker-compose;
• VNC viewer, like vinagre (ubuntu);
• python3.6;
• virtualenvs;

0. Preparations;

Install docker from the official website https://www.docker.com/

Install VNC viewer if you do not have one. For ubuntu, go for vinagre:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vinagre

1. Set your Linkedin login and password;

Copy conf_template.py in conf.py and fill the quotes with your credentials.

2. Run and build containers with docker-compose;

Only linkedin spider, not the companies spider. Open your terminal, move to the project folder and type:

docker-compose up -d --build

3. Take a look on the browser's activity:

Open vinagre, and type address and port localhost:5900. The password is secret. or otherwise:

vinagre localhost:5900
or
make view

4. Stop the scraper;

Use your terminal again, type in the same window:

docker-compose down

Test & Development:

Setup your python virtual environment (trivial but mandatory):

    virtualenvs -p python3.6 .venv
    source .venv/bin/activate
    pip install -r requirements.txt

Create the selenium server, open the VNC window and launch the tests, type those in three different terminals on the project folder:

    make dev
    make view
    make tests

For more details have a look at the Makefile (here is used to shortcut and not to build).

• Development:

    scrapy crawl companies -a selenium_hostname=localhost

or

    scrapy crawl linkedin -a selenium_hostname=localhost