Almaweb Parser & API

Scrapes the Almaweb Vorlesungsverzeichnis (course catalogue) of the University of Leipzig and exposes the collected data through a REST API.

The crawler walks the full module tree, parses each module and its courses (including room and building data), and stores everything in a local SQLite database. The API then serves that data with filtering, field selection, relation includes, and iCalendar export.

Setup

1. Clone the repository and open a terminal in the project root.
2. Create and activate a virtual environment (optional but recommended):

   python -m venv .venv
   source .venv/bin/activate       # Linux / macOS
   .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1      # Windows

3. Install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Run the crawler to populate the database:

   scrapy crawl lecture_spider

   This takes roughly 10 minutes. The crawler walks every page of the module tree, fetches up to 4 module pages and 8 course pages concurrently, and writes results to database.db as it goes. Progress is saved incrementally - interrupt with Ctrl+C and the modules parsed so far are kept.
5. Start the API server:

   fastapi dev src/api/main.py

API

Interactive documentation is available at http://localhost:8000/docs once the server is running.

All collection endpoints support:

• Paging - offset and limit
• Sorting - sort with field name, prefix - for descending
• Field selection - fields to return only specific columns
• Relation includes - include to embed related entities (e.g. include=courses.modules)
• Export formats - format=json (default), format=csv, and format=ical on event endpoints

iCal Export

Event endpoints support ?format=ical with customizable SUMMARY, DESCRIPTION, and LOCATION format strings via ical_title_format, ical_description_format, and ical_location_format. Placeholders use {field_name} syntax. An optional ical_reminder_minutes parameter adds a VALARM.

See ical-format-api.md for planned improvements to iCal title resolution and additional export parameters.

Tools to view iCal files

• ICS Viewer - A simple online tool to view .ics files without needing a calendar application.
• Giga Tools iCal Viewer - Another online viewer with a clean interface.

Configuration

Faculty filter - The crawler starts from the AlmaWeb external pages entry point and navigates the full semester tree, but currently only follows links under 10 - Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik. To target a different faculty, change the hard-coded prefix filter in src/parser/crawler.py.

Concurrency - The maximum number of concurrent requests is controlled by MAX_CONCURRENT_MODULE_REQUESTS in src/parser/module_parser.py (default: 4) and MAX_CONCURRENT_COURSE_REQUESTS in src/parser/course_parser.py (default: 8).

Scrapy settings - Throttling, caching, and other Scrapy options are in src/settings.py. AutoThrottle is enabled by default to avoid overloading the server.

Future Ideas

Crawler

• Add a periodic re-crawl mechanism that updates existing records instead of requiring a full re-run
• Add a last_updated timestamp to each datapoint
• Better error handling and logging in the crawler to identify and recover from parsing issues
• Add recovery from partial failures (if one module fails to parse, still ingest the rest of the data)
• Resume from the last successful point instead of starting over if the crawler exits halfway

API — Filters

• Modules: filter by specific path segments or exact path prefixes instead of only free-text search
• Courses: filter by exact staff members within the parsed staff list
• Events: filter by exact staff members within the parsed event staff list
• Events: add normalized location filters to distinguish building, room, and free-text notes

API — Endpoints

• Expose a room/location schedule endpoint (all events in a given room on a given day)

Data Model

• Parse degree and semester information from the path or other sources
• Optimize event storage (57k+ entries per semester)

Infrastructure

• Containerize with Docker
• Make endpoints compatible with the planer app