City of Austin Construction Permits

A searchable database of construction permits issued by the City of Austin since 1980.

Data is scraped from http://www.austintexas.gov/oss_permits/permit_report.cfm on a daily basis.

:information_source: The City of Austin has started publishing permits to their open data portal at https://data.austintexas.gov/Permitting/Building-Permits/q7kv-7293.

Usage

Install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set up a secrets file (permits/secrets.py):

GITHUB_AUTH=<github auth key>
MAPZEN_API_KEY=<mapzen API key>

Get today's construction permits and store them in the data directory:

python permits/permits.py

Run the tests:

nosetests

Deploy to AWS Lambda:

./lambda.sh

Scheduled

Twice a day an AWS lambda job runs permits.lambda_handler.

It fetches yesterday's permits, geocodes the addresses, and then uses the GitHub API to commit the data to this repo. This code is Python 2 because is run on AWS Lambda. Another side effect of being a lambda is we're trying to avoid dependencies with C extensions like pandas.

License

The code for this repository has been released into the public domain by Open Austin via the Unlicense.

Created by @spatialaustin and @luqmaan.