Add Python blog scraper with PostgreSQL storage (Dockerized)

[Lekhaaa-S]

What this does

Scrapes blog posts from blog.python.org and stores them in a PostgreSQL
database, fully containerized with Docker.

Approach

• Used the site's RSS feed (/rss.xml) instead of scraping raw HTML.
  RSS gives clean, structured data (title, link, author, date,
  description) without depending on the page's CSS/HTML structure,
  which is more fragile and breaks if the site redesigns.
• Parsed the feed with Python's built-in xml.etree.ElementTree.
• Stored results in a blogs table in PostgreSQL, with a UNIQUE
  constraint on url and ON CONFLICT ... DO UPDATE, so re-running the
  scraper updates existing rows instead of duplicating them.

Docker setup

• Dockerfile: builds the Python environment, installing
  requirements.txt before copying the rest of the source (for proper
  layer caching).
• docker-compose.yaml: runs two services — psql-db (Postgres) and
  scraper (the Python script). Added a healthcheck on psql-db so
  the scraper waits until the database is actually ready before
  connecting.

How to run

docker-compose up --build
docker logs workshop_python_container
docker exec -it psql-db psql -U postgres -d blogs_db -c "SELECT * FROM blogs LIMIT 10;"

Verified

• Scraper successfully fetches and parses the RSS feed (HTTP status: 200)
• 50 records saved to the database
• No empty titles/urls/authors, no duplicate urls