Craigslist Plugin¶ ↑

A plugin useful for aggregating Craigslist postings, worldwide. Originally written to collect “internet engineer” jobs specifically for Ruby on Rails telecommuting.

Setup¶ ↑

Requirements:

Rails 3.x

Create the craigslist_postings table

rails generate craigslist

Migrate

rake db:migrate

Usage¶ ↑

Instantiate a Craigslist::Parser object, and call get_postings

parser = Craigslist::Parser.new
postings = parser.get_postings

Rails Usage¶ ↑

The Craigslist::Parser::get_postings method is a long operation. We recommend installing Tobi’s delayed_job gem, so your user’s don’t wait for 10 minutes. After all, you are searching through craigslist worldwide!

Then subclass the Craigslist::Parser model in RAILS_ROOT/app/models/my_parser.rb

class MyParser < Craigslist::Parser
  handle_asynchronously :get_postings

  def before_get_postings
    puts ">>> BEFORE_GET"
    # Code here gets executed BEFORE "get_postings" is called
  end

  def after_get_postings
    puts ">>> AFTER_GET"
    # Code here gets executed AFTER "get_postings" is called
  end
end

Other Types of Postings¶ ↑

If you want to aggregate other types of jobs you’ll need to pass in the :search_path. For example, let’s say you want to look for “systems / network” contract jobs and search for “linux” within that category.

parser = Craigslist::Parser.new(:search_path => "/search/sad?query=linux&srchType=A&addTwo=contract&format=rss")

In the above search_path we dissect:

• “sad” for the job type “systems / network”

• “query=linux” for the search term

• “addTwo=contract” for contracting jobs only

The way you determine the search_path parameters is to go to a state or area specific craigslist page and walk through a manual HTML search first. After you perform a manual search using the form, take note of the URL in the address bar. Just copy everything from “/search” to the end of the query string, and use that as your “search_path” passed into the Craigslist::Parser.

Updates¶ ↑

Fork it, tweak it, check it in and send me a pull request. I’ll merge it if it makes sense.

We hope someone finds it useful.

Copyright © 2011 Midwire Technologies, LLC, released under the MIT license