Bedelías API

Structured academic data from Bedelías, the student records system of Universidad de la República (Uruguay), which has no public API.

Two components:

1. Scraper (scraper/) — a modular Selenium scraper that logs into Bedelías and extracts course prerequisites (previas), reverse dependencies (posprevias), credits and active courses (vigentes).
2. REST API (bedelia/) — a Django REST Framework API that serves the scraped data (careers, courses, prerequisite trees) with filtering and OpenAPI docs.

Project structure

├── scraper/               # Selenium scraper
│   ├── main.py            # Bedelias orchestrator and entry point
│   ├── scraper.py         # Base Scraper class
│   ├── config.py          # Env-based configuration (ScraperConfig)
│   ├── pages/             # One extractor per Bedelías page
│   │   ├── login.py, previas.py, posprevias.py, credits.py, vigentes.py
│   └── common/            # Navigation and table-pagination helpers
├── bedelia/               # Django REST API
│   ├── api/               # Models, serializers, views, data-load command
│   └── config/            # Settings, URLs, exception handling
├── data/                  # Scraped JSON backups
├── eligible_courses.py    # Analysis: which courses can I take now?
└── get_libres.py          # Analysis: courses that can be taken "libre"

Scraper

Setup

pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a .env file with your Bedelías credentials:

DOCUMENTO=your_document_number
CONTRASENA=your_password
BROWSER=firefox        # or chrome
DEBUG=False            # True shows the browser window
PAGES=previas,vigentes,posprevias,credits   # optional, defaults to all

Run

cd scraper
python main.py

Extracted data is written as JSON backups (see data/). On failure, a screenshot.png of the browser is saved to help debugging.

REST API

cd bedelia
pip install -r requirements.txt
USE_SQLITE=true python manage.py migrate
USE_SQLITE=true python manage.py load_bedelia_data --clear --verbose
USE_SQLITE=true python manage.py runserver

Or with Docker (PostgreSQL included):

cd bedelia
docker compose up --build

See QUICKSTART.md for the data model and verification steps, and the Postman collection (bedelia_previas_api.postman_collection.json) for example requests.

Configuration

Environment variable	Default	Description
USE_SQLITE	False	Use SQLite instead of PostgreSQL
DATABASE_URL	—	Full database URL (takes precedence)
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY	dev-only fallback	Set a real key in production
DEBUG	true	Django debug mode
ALLOWED_HOSTS	*	Comma-separated hosts
CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS	allow all	Comma-separated origins