TURBOT

Quick start

Want to help us liberate corporate data?

If you want to help, but don't know what to do, visit our separate OpenCorporates Missions website for ideas, then come back here.

If you have your own ideas for data to liberate, decide if it is appropriate to be stored in Turbot before continuing.

Step 1: install the turbot client

The turbot client allows you to generate new bots, test them, and submit them for automatic scheduling. A bot is a simple web scraper that conforms to the Turbot specification.

There are two options for installing the client. The easiest method is to use the installer, which is a beta version.

You can also install from source. Both options are described below.

Install the package

  • If you've previously installed from source, you'll first need to gem uninstall turbot
  • Download the installer.
  • Open the downloaded installer; then click the turbot-client.pkg icon
    • Depending on your OSX version, you may need to trust the package. If so, go to System Preferences, then Security & Privacy, then next to text saying turbot-client.pkg was blocked because it is not from an identified developer, click on Open Anyway.)
  • Open a terminal
  • Type turbot help. Verify you get sensible help text. If you see an error, please report it in our issue tracker and proceed to install from source.

Install from source

You must have Ruby 1.9.2 or higher on your system to install the turbot client from source.

Check which version of Ruby you have

Open Terminal and type:

ruby -v

It should print something like

ruby 1.9.3p385 ....

If you have 1.9.2 or higher, you can now install the turbot client. Otherwise, you should install a recent version of Ruby.

Install Ruby

If you don't have Ruby 1.9.2 or higher, you'll need to install it. The recommended way to do this is with Homebrew, which is very easy to install. Once you have Homebrew installed, you can install a recent version of Ruby with:

brew install ruby

Install the turbot client

Once you have ensured you have a recent version of Ruby, you can install the turbot client with:

sudo gem install turbot

Note: if you are familiar with Ruby tools like RVM or rbenv, you might want to use one of these to manage the gem.

You can test that the installation has worked by running:

turbot help

You should see some helpful output.

You can now register an account with Turbot.

Unfortunately, the turbot client does not yet work with Windows. This means that you won't be able to submit your scrapers for automatic scheduling.

If you're a Windows user and you'd like to write a scraper, please get in touch (via communities@opencorporates.com) and we'll work out the best way to help you.

There are two options for installing the client. The easiest method is to use the installer, which is a beta version, and works for recent (since 2012) Debian and Ubuntu.

You can also install from source. Both options are described below.

Install the package

  • If you've previously installed from source, you'll first need to gem uninstall turbot
  • Add the OpenCorporates apt repository to your sources:
    • echo "deb http://packages.opencorporates.com wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opencorporates.list
    • Trust our signing key: sudo /usr/bin/apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C15723A0
    • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install turbot-client
  • Open a terminal
  • Type turbot help. Verify you get sensible help text. If you see an error, please report it in our issue tracker and proceed to install from source.

Install from source

Check which version of Ruby you have

Open Terminal and type:

ruby -v

It should print something like

ruby 1.9.3p385 ....

If you have 1.9.2 or higher, you can now install the turbot client. Otherwise, you should install a recent version of Ruby (and rubygems) using your usual package manager, e.g.

apt-get install ruby1.9.3 rubygems

You will also need the following dependencies:

apt-get install ruby1.9.3-dev libsqlite3-dev

Install the turbot client

Once you have ensured you have a recent version of Ruby, you can install the turbot client with:

sudo gem install turbot

Note: if you are familiar with Ruby tools like RVM or rbenv, you might want to use one of these to manage the gem.

You can test that the installation has worked by running:

turbot help

You should see some helpful output.

You can now register an account with Turbot.

Next

Documentation