Metadrive

Metadrive helps control information from different Internet resources (e.g. Linkedin, Halfbakery, etc). It provides one API to rule them all at the operating system filesystem level, via allowing to mount and syncing web resources, as if they are disks (mounted filesystems) on your operating system. To gather the information from a specific resource, there must be so called driver written specifically for the resource. There are drivers which already exist. For example,

• Halfbakery: halfbakery_driver
• Linkedin: linkedin_driver
• Metaculus: metaculus_driver
• HTH Worldwide: hthworld_driver
• Kompass: kompass_driver
• ResearchGate: researchgate_driver
• Versli Lietuva: verslilietuva_driver

Many drivers are awaiting to be implemented at [drivernet][https://github.com/drivernet]. Studying the Metadrive will help developers to write the drivers for those resources which are needed them right now. A unified API is the killer feature of Metadrive and allows writing drivers to have a unified UI to the whole world.

Table of Contents

• Prepare machine
• Installation
• Documentation
• Authors
• Licensing

Prepare machine

sudo apt install virtualenv python3 python3-dev build-essential chromium-browser chromium-chromedriver pandoc

Installation

The guide provides for the instructions on how to install Metadrive to a virtual environment, so create and activate it first, running the following commands:

pip install metadrive

Note: by default, all sessions are stored at ~/.metadrive/sessions/, under the subfolder of underscored "metadrive", e.g., _selenium default session is at ~/.metadrive/sessions/_selenium/default, or _requests default session data is at ~/.metadrive/sessions/_requests/default

Usage

If you want to mount resources

Mounting site to ~/Sites or to custom location:

drive halfbakery.com # defaults to /home/<user>/Sites
drive halfbakery.com /my/custom/location

The command above will ask you to type your GitHub username. When you are done, the .metadrive/config will be created in your home directory and the server will start. The example of how .metadrive/config may look like:

[GITHUB]
username = mindey

[DRIVER_BACKENDS]
chrome = /usr/bin/chromedriver

[PROXIES]
http =
https =

[GPG]
key = 5AFDB16B89805133F450688BDA580D1D5F5CC7AD

If you want to use resources in code

import metadrive

Minimal, with 'default' session in ~/.metadrive/session/<metadrive>/default:

# Examples:

drive = metadrive._requests.get_drive()                # metadrive: 'requests', driver: None, profile: 'default'
drive = metadrive._requests.get_drive(profile='novel') # metadrive: 'requests', driver: None, profile: 'novel'
drive = metadrive._selenium.get_drive(headless=False)  # metadrive: 'selenium', driver: None, profile: 'default'

If you want to use a custom driver interface with default session, e.g.:

# Examples:
drive = metadrive.drives.get('halfbakery-driver')          # metadrive: implied, driver: halfbakery-driver, profile: 'default'
drive = metadrive.drives.get('halfbakery-driver:SomeName') # metadrive: implied, driver: halfbakery-driver, profile: 'SomeName'

This installs the pip install halfbakery-driver, and uses it. Each driver has to have .__site_url__ attribute, and this way, metadrive determines which resource requires which driver to read.

The documentation for Metadrive can be found at https://metadrive.readthedocs.io.

Authors

See AUTHORS.

Licensing

metadrive is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.