Introduction

A Python script to fetch the top sites from for a particular country. It uses AWS Alexa Top Sites Service, so you have to register an AWS account before using.

Requirements

• Python 2 or Python 3
• Needed libraries can be installed by the following command

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

./ats.py -country US -count 1000 -secret xxx -key xxx [-start 10]

Where:

• country: should be the 2 character ISO_3166-1 style
• count: the number of top sites to fetch
• secret: secret access key from your AWS account
• key: access key id from your AWS account
• start (optional): the website ranking you want to get started, the default is 1

Results will be:

• printed to the screen with format: Ranking Domain
• saved to a json file (top_alexa.json) with format {"1": "google.com", ...}

How to get an access key and a secret key

1. Sign up for an Amazon AWS account at https://aws.amazon.com/.

2. Create an IAM user

3. Create a Customer Managed Policy

   • Select the JSON tab in the Policy Editor

   • If the following message box appears, you may safely close it.

   • Paste the following in the editor window.

     {
         "Version": "2012-10-17",
         "Statement": [
             {
                 "Effect": "Allow",
                 "Action": [
                     "AlexaTopSites:GET"
                 ],
                 "Resource": [
                     "*"
                 ]
             }
         ]
     }

   • Click Review Policy. In the Review Policy window, assign a Name to the policy and Click Create Policy.

   • The following warning message can be safely ignored.

     

     

4. Assign the previous execution policy for the service to the user created above.

5. Get the IAM access keys from the IAM user management console page of the Amazon AWS portal.

References

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AlexaTopSites/latest/

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/alexa-top-sites/

[3] https://secaholic.com/a-python-script-get-alexa-top-sites-4652768dfa96