View your fantasy football leagues and get text alerts when one of your players scores.
THIS IS NOT READY FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION YET. I’VE POSTED IT FOR REFERENCE
PURPOSES ONLY. I HOPE TO MAKE THIS MORE AMENABLE TO END USERS AT SOME POINT.
AT THIS POINT IN TIME, THIS IS ONLY ACCESSIBLE TO PROGRAMMERS, FOR SOME
DEFINITION OF ‘ACCESSIBLE’.
I have no intention of testing this on Windows or Mac. If it accidentally
works on either of those platforms, color me happy.
fanfoot is a package designed to do two things: 1) Download roster and matchup
data from a fantasy league (only Yahoo and ESPN at the moment) and 2) provide a
command line interface to view that data, compute scores and send alerts.
It all works by using a SQLite database to store the data. (SQLite is used
primarily for its support of concurrent read and write access, and not
necessarily for relational storage.) There are a couple update scripts that
use YQL to grab data from Yahoo leagues and BeautifulSoup to grab data from
ESPN leagues (that must be public, currently). There are also a bunch of
scripts that allow different views of that data.
The central idea is to run scripts like ‘fan-upleagues’ and ‘fan-upstatus’
every so often (maybe every 30 minutes and once a day, respectively) which
update the SQLite database, and run scripts like ‘fan-alert’ during game time
to send alerts.
Here are some ideas of what I’m working on (or would like to work on):
An alert system that uses nflgame.live and nflgame.alert to send text
messages whenever a player on your team or your opponent’s team scores a
touchdown. (Or theoretically, any statistic that goes up. But that will
probably be a bit too much.)
A program that automatically prints every play happening live, and highlights
plays that involve a player on one of your teams.
Cache maximum player statistics (that is, a combination of game and
play-by-play player data) in the SQLite database, so that viewing the data
is instantaneous. (The bottleneck here is deriving cumulative data from all
of the play-by-play data.) This change will likely have some design
implications on the current state of affairs. I probably won’t do this unless
performance becomes a problem.
Provide a simple web interface to view the data. (And I do mean very simple.
I’m thinking a stupid PHP script to run the commands and print the data in
tables. I’m not really motivated enough to do anything more.)
nflgame
pytz (optional dependency of nflgame; necessary for fanfoot)
pygooglevoice (optional dependency of nflgame and fanfoot)
BeautifulSoup 4
yql (which requires httplib2 and oauth2)
httplib2 (dependency of yql; installed automatically if using PyPI)
oauth2 (dependency of yql; installed automatically if using PyPI)
Right now, you’ll have to clone the repository and add the directory containing
the repository to your PYTHONPATH environment variable. Then add the ‘bin’
directory to your PATH.
This package needs to be told some information about each of your leagues. This
minimally includes where your league is hosted (currently supported: ‘yahoo’
and ‘espn’), the league key (see below), the year of the season (e.g., 2012)
and a label that can be anything you choose. (i.e., “keeper”, “pro”, “work”,
etc.")
All of these values are specified in ‘fanfoot/config.ini’. The label goes in
the square brackets (‘[’ and ‘]’), and the ‘kind’, ‘season’ and ‘key’ follow
that.
Finally, and optionally, you may specify scoring settings specific to your
league. You only need to specify scoring settings that are different from
standard Yahoo league settings. (See the “Scoring” section below for more info
on what kinds of options are available.)
League keys are typically numeric (or close to) identifiers for your league.
The format of these league keys vary depending upon who is hosting your league.
For example, on Yahoo, one of my league’s keys is “273.l.104464” while the
league key for my ESPN league is “10332293”.
Yahoo keys can be found by concatenating a special season numeric code (273 is
for the 2012 season, but it changes every year), the letter ‘l’ (lowercase
‘L’), and a numeric league identifier that can be found at the end of your
league’s homepage URL. (i.e., the ‘104464’ in
‘http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f1/104464’.) So that the final league
key for this league is “273.l.104464”.
ESPN keys can be found in their entirety at the end of your league’s homepage
URL. (i.e., the ‘1032293’ in
‘http://games.espn.go.com/ffl/leagueoffice?leagueId=1032293&seasonId=2012’.) So
that the final league key for this league is “10332293”. Note that currently,
your ESPN league must be public. (I probably won’t add support for private ESPN
leagues until I’m in one, so feel free to submit a patch/pull request.)
The scoring system is not extremely robust at the moment, but it should be
enough to make one dangerous. I’ve devised the fields from a very small sample
size (four leagues; two are Yahoo standard scoring, one is half-PPR with some
penalties for missed fields goals and one is an ESPN PPR with 6 point PTDs), so
it’s very likely that they aren’t fine-grained enough or are not exhaustive.
Also, I don’t have a list of fields supported in plain text anywhere, but you
can find them at the top of ‘fanfoot/scoring.py’. Every field can be overridden
in ‘fanfoot/config.ini’.
Finally, this module is at the mercy of NFL.com’s GameCenter data. And it has
errors. They aren’t exactly rare, but I’d say they are uncommon. There are
some heuristics used in nflgame to mitigate errors, but it isn’t perfect (and
it never will be). The upside here is that scoring isn’t necessary for some of
the cooler features of fanfoot, like text alerts. (Which just looks at
touchdowns, independent of the scoring system.)
If you’re trying to add Yahoo league data, you’ll need to configure YQL—which
is a SQL-like language used to query personal data associated with your Yahoo
account. It can be a bit of a pain to setup, but you only need to do it once
(and it will work for future seasons and any number of leagues).
First, you’ll need a Yahoo Developer account (which is free). You should be
able to sign up for one here: https://developer.apps.yahoo.com — Make sure to
use the Yahoo account that you use for your leagues. When you have an account,
create a new project. When creating a project, make sure you check either
“Read” or “Read/Write” privileges for “Fantasy Sports”. (This package doesn’t
need “Write” privileges, so you may safely check “Read”.)
Second, you’ll need to tell fanfoot what your key information is. In the
fanfoot directory, there is a file called ‘yql-sample.ini’. Rename that to
‘yql.ini’. Now open it in your favorite text editor and fill in the
information. (The ‘secret’ and ‘key’ fields can be found on your project page
in your Yahoo Developer account. The ‘storage_key’ field can be any random
string that doesn’t contain any ‘#’ or ‘;’ characters.) Since this file
contains sensitive information, I recommend that you protect it in some way.
(Make it owner readable/writable only on civilized operating systems, i.e.,
‘chmod 600 fanfoot/yql.ini’.)