Get company registration data for the State of Delaware.
Project description
It might be nice if it were easy to get data about company registrations. Much information is available through the General Information Name Search site, and the present program queries this website for information.
Installing the worker
The present program is separated into worker, manager, and reader components. This is done so that many different workers can be run at once, coordinated by a single manager.
You probably just need to install the worker and run it; by default, it will receive its directions from a manager running on one of Tom’s computers. It will periodically contact the manager for directions, and it will query Delaware’s General Information Name Search accordingly.
Two ways of installing are explained below.
- Standalone installation
For most people
- Installing with Pip
For people who know what Python and Pip and terminals are
Standalone installation
I am going to make a package with PyInstaller and put directions here as to how to install it. So this installation method isn’t available yet.
Installing with Pip
If you are used to using a terminal and already have Python and Pip installed, you can just run this command.
pip install delaware
If that gives you an error about permissions, try this command.
sudo pip install delaware
Running
Once you’ve installed the program, type this into a terminal.
delaware
It’ll ask you a few questions the first time you run it, but you can totally ignore it after that.
How it works
When you run delaware, you are running the worker program. Tom is running the manager program. When it starts, your worker contacts Tom’s manager for directions.
Why would I make such a complicated program?
I’ve told that some people much difficulty in acquiring the data, and I made the present program to deal with the most annoying of difficulties. The difficulty is, supposedly, that the website only allows a single IP address to make so many requests. One person told me that the limit was a few hundred requests per IP address, and another person told me that the limit was 3000 requests.
Having used the site myself, I don’t think that such a limit exists; I haven’t managed to hit any of these limits myself, and the Delaware Division of Corporations told me that there is no limit. So maybe this complicated thing wasn’t necessary, but I already wrote it.
But in case there is a limit, the idea is that we can get a bunch of different people each to download a small piece of the data, staying within the limits for each IP address.
If errors come up
If the program stops running, please send the error message to _@thomaslevine.com. Also, please don’t delete the ~/.delaware directory, as it contains files that can be helpful for figuring out what went wrong.
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