I decided to create this project to further train my programming skills. My goal was to create a “base” for mockup SaaS (service as a subscription) website.

First, I decided that my “product” will be cars selling related data. I decided to use Scrapy to scrape a lot of data from one of the most popular websites that deals in selling cars from both private people and companies.

After the script was working and saving proper data in a proper way I decided to further optimize this workflow. I bought some proxy IPs and used scripts that will rotate both IPs and user agents to not get me banned. I didn’t want to cause troubles to website servers so I decided to create a Docker container with it and host this on VPS (where I made scraping slower and therefore longer but more server friendly by enabling throttling).

After I had all the data (over 198 000 entries) I created a Django website where I further enhanced my “product” by offering searches through my data with advanced filters and some graphs and charts (thanks Chart.js !). I created both Free and Paid ranks with different amounts of features.

After that, as the most expensive “Tier” I decided to create an API with Django REST and give users the possibility to access database through both URL and CURL requests.

And as a final touch I hosted it on PythonAnywhere where you can view whole website - https://carpricestool.eu.pythonanywhere.com

Cheers!

Some additional screenshots:



Thank You :-)