This Django application helps reporters track federal court cases. It does so by downloading RSS feeds supplied by many federal courts. The live feeds include many of the filings in civil, criminal, appeals and bankruptcy cases. PACER Tracker has tracked hundreds of millions of entries in millions of cases.
PACER Tracker allows reporters to receive live or daily alerts for specific cases they wish to track or for cases with parties that match keywords they specify. For instance, a keyword of "ACME" would return any case where ACME Corp. is the primary plaintiff or the primary defendant. That could result in a business reporter writing a story. Similarly, an education reporter could set up an alert for "school district" and receive alerts about cases involving school districts in their area.
The app supplies a web interface for users (who are added by an admin) to setup alerts, change their password and setup groups of frequently-used courts.
loadcourts - Updates information about all the federal courts, including whether they now have a feed. It is recommended to run this multiple times per day.
trackcases - Downloads, processes and loads data from all available RSS feeds. Should be run as frequently as possible.
sendemails - Sends alert emails to users. Should be run as frequently as possible. The "daily" option should be run once per day.
PACER Tracker produces verbose logs that can be used to track its performance and identify any bugs. It is recommended to capture PACER Tracker logging at the INFO level in a file.
Specify the email address from which emails will be sent in your settings.py.
ALERTS_FROM_EMAIL = '[email protected]'Some PACER Tracker forms use a large number of fields. An error will be generated unless the max number of fields check is disabled.
DATA_UPLOAD_MAX_NUMBER_FIELDS = NoneIn addition to other Django requirements and PACER Tracker itself, you will also need to add localflavor and Haystack to your installed apps.
INSTALLED_APPS = [
'pacertracker',
'localflavor',
'haystack',
'django.contrib.humanize',
'django.contrib.sites',
'django.contrib.admin',
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.messages',
'django.contrib.staticfiles',
]PACER Tracker scans for filings and sends emails on average every two minutes with the following setup...
- Two virtual cores @ 3.2ghz and 4GB of RAM
- PostgreSQL 14.10
- Solr 9.0.0
- Python 3.10.5
- Django 3.2.13