Your movie site in just one minute

This is a rewrite/improvement of my popular script/post Your own movie database in 5 minutes with IMDb API and Perl that got (and still gets) quite some visits every day. I rewrote the code in Python, took out the DB dependency (goal was a static site anyways) and documented the steps.

Disclaimer: this is quick and dirty. If you want to build a a real movie site, use something more powerful like themoviedb, I used that A. to build sharemovi.es and B. create a weekly movie email script. So keep that in mind when reading this and if you decide to use it.

Steps

You don’t have to create any text files unless you want to use your own set of movies, all files are in this github repo.

• copy and paste top 250 movies from imdb and put in file called inimdb-top-rated.txt file (or use your own but use the same syntax: movie,year)

    $ head  imdb-top-rated.txt
    1. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)  9.2
    2. The Godfather (1972)   9.2
    3. The Godfather: Part II (1974)  9.0
    4. The Dark Knight (2008)   8.9
    5. Pulp Fiction (1994)  8.9
  

• normalize the data to title,year:

    $ grep -v "^ *$" imdb-top-rated.txt |perl -pe 's/ *\d+\.\s+(.*)\s+.*\((\d+)\).*/\1,\2/g' > movielist.txt
  
    $ wc -l movielist.txt
    250 movielist.txt
  
    $ head movielist.txt
    The Shawshank Redemption,1994
    The Godfather,1972
    The Godfather: Part II,1974
    The Dark Knight,2008
    Pulp Fiction,1994
    Schindler's List,1993
    12 Angry Men,1957
    The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,2003
    The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,1966
    Fight Club,1999
  

• run the python script that queries omdb for movie info returning a nice html page. OK, 2% not found, I can live with that, look at the runtime :)

    $ time python your_moviedb.py movielist.txt
    ERR2: cannot find movie: Old Boy (year: 2003)
    ERR2: cannot find movie: Érase una vez en América (year: 1984)
    ERR2: cannot find movie: M (year: 1931)
    ERR2: cannot find movie: Nader y Simin, una separación (year: 2011)
    ERR2: cannot find movie: Relatos salvajes (year: 2014)
    Done, 245 processed, created static html movie page: topmovies.html
  
    real 0m13.348s
    user 0m0.755s
    sys 0m0.420s
  

• see example output by opening topmovies.html output file in the browser (edit CSS in this file to your liking). One issue I found though was that the IMDB poster URLs get 403 (forbidden) when hosting this output html on a domain (on localhost it works). So you need to use another API (themoviedb, facebook) for this, see here.

• to quickly test this you can run this (assuming Mac)

    $ mkdir movie_test && cd $_
    $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bbelderbos/own_movie_site/master/test.sh
    --2016-02-23 18:39:50--  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bbelderbos/own_movie_site/master/test.sh
    Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com... 23.235.43.133
    Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com|23.235.43.133|:443... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: 1004 [text/plain]
    Saving to: ‘test.sh’
  
    100%[=========================================================>] 1,004       --.-K/s   in 0s
  
    2016-02-23 18:39:52 (479 MB/s) - ‘test.sh’ saved [1004/1004]
  
    $ chmod 755 test.sh
    $ ./test.sh
    Test script for { Your movie site in just one minute }
    See http://bobbelderbos.com/2016/02/movie-site-in-minute-omdb-api-python/ for more info
  
    1. creating textfile my_movies_1456249202.txt with 10 movies in it
  
    2. importing required html template
    --2016-02-23 18:40:02--  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bbelderbos/own_movie_site/master/template.html
    Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com... 185.31.18.133
    Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com|185.31.18.133|:443... connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
    Length: 1362 (1.3K) [text/plain]
    Saving to: ‘template.html’
  
    100%[=========================================================>] 1,362       --.-K/s   in 0s
  
    2016-02-23 18:40:02 (433 MB/s) - ‘template.html’ saved [1362/1362]
  
    3. run the movie site creation script (via github)
    Done, 9 processed, created static html movie page: mymovies.html in 1 seconds
  
    4. open the generated html site in default browser (mac, other OS, click on generateed mymovies.html)
  
    _____________________________ 
    < Thanks bbelderb for testing >
    ----------------------------- 
            \   ^__^
            \  (oo)\_______
                (__)\       )\/\
                    ||----w |
                    ||     ||
  

Resulting page

I hope you like it and feel free to leave any comment of feedback in the comments below.