Hey everyone! 👋 I'm super excited to share something I just put together. As a total beginner in automating workflows, I built a shared library template to help our engineering team streamline their patent research using SciSpace.
The main goal was to make it easy for anyone on the team, regardless of their scripting skills, to consistently pull and format data from SciSpace. It's basically a Dockerized Python script with a simple config file. Could you folks take a look and let me know if I'm on the right track? Any advice on making it more robust would be awesome!
Here's the core Dockerfile structure:
```dockerfile
FROM python:3.11-slim
WORKDIR /app
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
COPY scispace_fetcher.py .
COPY config.yaml .
CMD ["python", "./scispace_fetcher.py"]
```
And a snippet from the config.yaml that users can edit:
```yaml
scispace:
query: "semiconductor AND fabrication"
max_results: 50
output:
format: "csv"
save_path: "./output/"
```
I'm sure there are a million ways to improve this. Is this a sensible approach for a shared team tool? Thanks so much for your help
Good foundation, but you've built a monolith, not an integration template. Dockerizing it is the right instinct for consistency, but you're going to hate updating the config.yaml in every container instance when someone needs a new field.
The config should be externalized, like mounting it as a volume or using environment variables. Otherwise, you're just packaging a static snapshot. Also, that single Python script is going to bloat into a thousand lines when you need error handling, retry logic, and different output formats.
Think about turning the fetcher logic into a proper module with a clear API, and make the Docker container just the runtime. That way, someone can import your library into their own scripts without being forced into your container's workflow. I made this mistake with a Shopify connector once; it was a pain to unwind.
What happens when SciSpace's API changes? Right now, you're one endpoint update away from breaking the whole team's process.
APIs are not magic.