Save the interactives!

This program scrapes writing.com interactive stories. You can:

• Save stories to a local database
• Read them in your browser

You need a paid (basic or above) writing.com account to use this. It cannot handle the "Interactive Stories are Temporarily Unavailable" error page.

Setup

To run this program, you need Docker and Sqlite3.

Configuration

In src/main/resources/applicaton.conf, you will need to change:

• my_session and user_ntoken: These are your writing.com cookies.
  • If writing.com logs you out, you will need to log in again and update application.conf with your new cookies
• use_config_stories: this must be either true or false
  • false: save interactive stories you have favorited. These appear here: writing.com/main/my_favorites
  • true: only save the stories in stories. See the instructions in application.conf

Database setup

This will save stories to a local Sqlite database. This is just a file on your computer. You will need to create it by following these steps:

# Create an empty file
touch wcomdownloader.db
# Run the migrations (assumes you are in in the base directory of this repo)
sqlite3 wcomdownloader.db < db/migration.sql

Docker image build

Just run:

docker-compose build

Re-run this every time the code updates, or if you update the configuration file.

Usage

Save the stories

This will scrape writing.com for stories and save them to your local database.

Run the docker-compose service scrape, supplying the path to the database you created earlier as an environment variable:

DB=/path/to/wcomdownloader.db docker-compose run scrape

Rendering HTML

This will render your stories into HTML that you can read in your browser. Start at outline.html. Note that this is a very basic generator. It writes semantic HTML with no CSS styling.

Run the docker-compose service render, supplying the path to your database and the directory in which stories will be written. Supply the same directory over multiple runs: if new chapters are saved, the renderer will add them to the existing story and re-render preceding chapters so that the links work.

DB=/path/to/wcomdownloader.db RENDER=/path/to/directory/ docker-compose run render