LEGISinfo Git Scraper

A Python utility to scrape Canadian parliamentary bills and laws from the LEGISinfo API and document viewer, converting updates into Git commits in a separate data repository.

Installation

You can run legisinfo-scraper as a command-line tool directly:

Running directly (via uvx)

To run the scraper without installing it locally:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/mlhamel/legisinfo-scraper.git legisinfo-scraper --repo /path/to/legisinfo.git --session 45-1

Installing globally (via uv)

uv tool install git+https://github.com/mlhamel/legisinfo-scraper.git

Installing from PyPI (once published)

uv tool install legisinfo-scraper

Usage

Once installed, the CLI tool legisinfo-scraper will be available directly:

legisinfo-scraper --repo /path/to/legisinfo.git --session 45-1

To scrape all historical legislative data across all sessions:

legisinfo-scraper --repo /path/to/legisinfo.git --session all

Script Workflow

1. Downloads the active session bills list in XML format.
2. Identifies all bills and crawls their detailed status and publications.
3. Downloads the bill metadata XML and legislative text drafts.
4. Updates the target directory.
5. Performs git diff analysis and commits updates with detailed messages.