How to Build a Flask Movie Scrapper

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will be building a movie scrapper using Python. Next, we will be wrapping it into a web app using Flask. For the movie data we will be scrapping from an API from RAPIDAPI, the link is here. We will also be using the requests library to make HTTP requests.

Install modules

Now it’s time to install Flask and requests. To install them, run the commands below on your terminal.

pip3 install Flask 

pip3 install requests

App structure

Create a folder called flask-movie and inside create a folder called templates with a file called index.html in it which will contain our application user interface. Inside the flask-movie folder create a file called app.py.

Import modules

Inside the app.py file we created earlier let’s import a few modules and initialize our application.

from flask import Flask, request, render_template 

import requests 

app = Flask(__name__)

Scrape movie data

Now let’s create a view to scrape data from an API. In this tutorial, we will be using an API from RAPIDAPI to get our data. Go to RAPIDAPI and subscribe to the API and make sure to keep your API key private.

@app.route('/',methods=['GET','POST'])
def index():
	if request.method == "POST":
		title = request.form['title']
		url = "https://ott-details.p.rapidapi.com/search"

		querystring = {"title":title,"page":"1"}

		headers = {
			"X-RapidAPI-Key": "YOUR API KEY",
			"X-RapidAPI-Host": "ott-details.p.rapidapi.com"
		}

		response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers, params=querystring).json()

		for data in response['results']:
			genre = data['genre']
			title = data['title']
			typ = data['type']
			released = data['released']
			return render_template("index.html",genre=genre,title=title,typ=typ, released=released)
			
	return render_template("index.html")



if __name__ == "__main__":
	app.run(debug=True)