Adds readme documentation, and startup script.

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# cali_scraper
A scraper for the California Legislature's Daily File publications — the
Assembly and Senate pages that list bills up for hearing — plus a
relational store and a local web dashboard for browsing the results.
## What this is
The pipeline has three lanes:
1. **Ingest (the scrape)** — `python -m scraper ingest`. Downloads and caches
the Assembly daily-file HTML page and the Senate daily-file PDF for a given
date, plus the chambers' "upcoming events" calendars. Raw pages are cached
on disk (`cache/raw/`), so re-running the same date hits the network zero
times. A legitimate "no publication that day" (weekend / recess) is treated
as a normal outcome, not an error.
2. **Store & analyze** — `parse`, `migrate`, and `correlate` load the cached
pages into a SQLite database (`db/daily_file.sqlite`, schema in
`SCHEMA.md`); `analyze` runs subject-matter tagging on bills (built-in
keyword tagger by default; optionally a local Ollama model, see `llm:` in
`config.yaml`).
3. **Dashboard (web server)** — `python -m scraper dashboard`. Serves an API
plus a static frontend on `http://127.0.0.1:8000/` so you can browse bills,
committees, members, and tags without touching the database directly.
`start.sh` at the repo root runs the scrapes, then starts the dashboard.
## How to kick it off
### Prerequisites
- Python 3.9+
- Dependencies: `pip install -r requirements.txt`
- Populate the database at least once so the dashboard has data to show (see
below — `start.sh` scrapes but does not build `db/daily_file.sqlite`).
### Just run it
```bash
./start.sh
```
That scrapes **today's** daily files (plus the events calendars), then serves
the dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:8000/. Press `Ctrl+C` to stop.
### Useful variations
```bash
# scrape a specific date, then serve
DATE=2026-09-02 ./start.sh
# force a network re-fetch even if a date is already cached
FORCE=1 ./start.sh
# serve on a different port / bind address
PORT=9000 HOST=0.0.0.0 ./start.sh
# skip the scrape and just start the dashboard
SKIP_SCRAPE=1 ./start.sh
```
### Build the database (one time)
`start.sh` handles the scrape + server, but to see bills in the dashboard the
SQLite database must be built from the cached pages:
```bash
python -m scraper ingest --date 2026-09-02 # download + cache
python -m scraper ingest --date 2026-09-02 --store-events \
--db db/daily_file.sqlite # events calendar
python -m scraper parse --input cache/raw/assembly_daily_file \
--house assembly --sqlite db/daily_file.sqlite # bills table
python -m scraper migrate --db db/daily_file.sqlite # relational schema
python -m scraper correlate --db db/daily_file.sqlite # bill <-> committee
python -m scraper analyze --db db/daily_file.sqlite # subject tags
```
Then `./start.sh` (or `python -m scraper dashboard` directly) will serve it.
See `INGESTION.md`, `DAILY_FILE_PARSE_SPEC.md`, `CORRELATE.md`, and
`LLM_ANALYSIS.md` for the full command reference.