Boxd Out

I created a Django REST Framework app to scrape movies from Letterboxd and save them to a PostgreSQL database. Initially built with Go in March 2025, I moved to Python to take advantage of the Django ecosystem as my new job role would use this stack. I previously wrote about it here REST API with Go .

The previous stack used Gin (Go web framework), saved results to MongoDB, and was deployed to fly.io. I would then fetch the results using a Netlify function to show on my About page. Although I preferred the structure in that setup; a controller, service, repository, and model for each entity, I do enjoy the opioniated way of Django.

The Core Functionality is extracting favorite movies from Letterboxd and storing the data in a PostgreSQL database. The API has 4 main endpoints:

1. Health check endpoint
2. Scrape Letterboxd favorites
3. Retrieve Letterboxd favorites
4. Save favorites

There is some image processing going on during the process too, as the extracted images are too small and have query strings attached. I clean them up, resize them, and save the image url to the DB. The final model structure is very simple:

{
  title: string;
  year: string;
  status: "FAVORITE" | "SAVED";
  image_url: string;
  link_url: string;
  created_at: string;
  updated_at: string;
}

The Djano REST Framework API provides 8 main endpoints. I added a new one to fetch individual movies by title and save them to the DB. Doing a POST /movies/save/ with a JSON body of {"movie_title": "apocalypse-now"} will save the movie to the DB.

One new technology I have been exposed to is uv for Python management. It is so handy for managing Python dependencies and virtual environments. Like completely changed how much I despised Python management. The project is deployed to Railway using a simple Procfile and has a couple of security headers to only work on HTTPS.

#Django #Python #BeautifulSoup #PostgreSQL