137 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
137 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
title: a comic strip downloader and archiver
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description: a comic strip downloader and archiver
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---
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Introduction
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-------------
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Dosage is designed to keep a local copy of specific webcomics
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and other picture-based content such as Picture of the Day sites.
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With the dosage commandline script you can get the latest strip of
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a webcomic, or catch-up to the last strip downloaded, or download a
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strip for a particular date/index (if the webcomic's site layout
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allows this).
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Notice
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-------
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This software is in no way intended to publically "broadcast" comic strips,
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it is purely for personal use. Please be aware that by making downloaded
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strips publically available (without the explicit permission of the author)
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you may be infringing upon various copyrights.
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Additionally, Dosage respects the robots.txt exclusion protocol.
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This makes sure no content is accessed in an automatic way without consent
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by the publishers.
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If you are a publisher of comics and want Dosage to access your files,
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add the following entry to your robotst.txt file:
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```
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User-agent: Dosage
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Allow: *
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```
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Adult content
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--------------
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Some comics contain adult content and require age confirmation.
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These comics can only be downloaded by using the --adult option,
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which confirms that you are old enough to view them.</p>
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Usage
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------
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List [available comics](comic-index.html) (ca. 3000 at the moment):
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```bash
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$ dosage --list
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```
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Get the latest comic of for example CalvinAndHobbes and save it in the "Comics"
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directory:
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```bash
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$ dosage CalvinAndHobbes
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```
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If you already have downloaded several comics and want to get the latest
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strip of all of them:
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```bash
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$ dosage @
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```
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To help others find good [comics](comic-index.html), you can vote for your
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favourite ones:
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```bash
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$ dosage --vote @
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```
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For advanced options and features execute `dosage --help` or look at the
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[dosage(1) manual page](dosage.1.html).
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Note that the old commandline program `maintool` has been renamed to
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`dosage`.
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Dependencies
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-------------
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[Python](http://www.python.org/): for Python 2.x at least 2.7.0, for Python 3.x at least Python 3.3.
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Also the [python-requests module](http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/) must be installed
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Installation
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-------------
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The easy way with pip:
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```shell
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pip install dosage
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```
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You can invoke Dosage directly from the source code as
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`./dosage`. Alternatively,
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you can install Dosage using python distutils by invoking
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setup.py in the root of the distribution. For example:
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```shell
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python setup.py install
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```
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or if you do not have root permissions:
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```shell
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python setup.py install --home=$HOME
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```
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Technical Description
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----------------------
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Dosage is written in Python and relies on regular expressions to
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do most of the grunt work.
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For each webcomic Dosage has a plugin module, found in the
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`dosagelib/plugins` subdirectory. Each module is a subclass of
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the `_BasicScraper` class and specifies where to download its comic images.
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Some comic syndicates (ucomics for example) have a standard layout for all
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comics. For such cases there are general base classes derived from
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`_BasicScraper` which help define the plugins for all comics of this syndicate.
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Extending Dosage
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-----------------
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In order to add a new webcomic, a new module class has to be created in
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one of the *.py files in the `dosagelib/plugins` subdirectory.
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Look at the existing module classes for examples.
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Reporting Bugs
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---------------
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You can report bugs, patches or requests at the
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[Github issue tracker](https://github.com/wummel/dosage/issues)
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Dosage currently supports a large number of comics and that number
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grows on a regular basis. If you feel that there are comics that
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Dosage does not currently support but should support, please
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feel free to request them.
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Test suite status
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------------------
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Dosage has extensive unit tests to ensure the code quality.
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[Travis CI](https://travis-ci.org/) is used for continuous build
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and test integration.
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[](https://travis-ci.org/wummel/dosage)
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