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