📰 News Automator — Real-Time News Aggregator (Python + Streamlit)

Summary: A professional, real-time news application that fetches and filters headlines across categories and sources. Built to showcase modern Python web development, API integration, and clean UI/UX in a portfolio-ready app.

Stack: Python · Streamlit · NewsAPI · Requests · python-dotenv · pandas

🎯 What This App Does (at a glance)

Real-time news: Pulls the latest headlines by category.
Smart search: Query across all sources (e.g., “AI”, “inflation”).
Source explorer: Browse sources per category with descriptions and links.
Polished UI: Responsive layout with sidebar controls and custom styling.
Resilient: Graceful error handling (timeouts, missing keys, bad responses).
Tunable: Choose how many articles to display (e.g., 5–50).

🧩 Why I Built It

I wanted a compact project that demonstrates:

API integration end-to-end (auth, params, pagination guards, status handling).
Interactive UX with Streamlit (sidebar configs, dynamic results).
Clean code structure (separating UI from business logic).
Deployability (local + Streamlit Cloud / Docker options).

🛠️ Technologies

Python 3.8+
Streamlit for the interactive web app
NewsAPI for live data
Requests for HTTP calls
python-dotenv for environment variables
pandas for light transformation/formatting

📦 Project Structure

Port/
├── streamlit_news_app.py    # UI: Streamlit app (layout, controls, display)
├── news_automator.py        # Logic: API calls, validation, error handling
├── requirements.txt         # Dependencies
├── .env                     # Environment variables (create this locally)
└── README.md                # Project documentation

⚙️ Setup (Local)

Clone

git clone <your-repo-url>
cd Port

Install deps

pip install -r requirements.txt

Configure env

Create a .env file in the project root:

API_KEY=your_news_api_key_here

Get a free API key from NewsAPI.org.

Run

streamlit run streamlit_news_app.py

Then open http://localhost:8501

🚀 Usage

Browse by category: Business, Entertainment, General, Health, Science, Sports, Tech

→ Set number of results, click Fetch News.

Search: Enter keywords (“AI regulation”, “interest rates”), fetch relevant articles.
View sources: Explore available sources per category with links and descriptions.

UI niceties

Responsive layout, sidebar configuration
Friendly error messages (API limits, network errors)
Portfolio panel (tech stack, links, instructions)

🧠 Core Functions (from `news_automator.py`)

get_articles_by_category(category, max_articles=20) → top headlines for a category
get_articles_by_query(query, max_articles=20) → search across sources
get_news_sources(category) → list sources + metadata

Built-in validation & error handling (HTTP status checks, empty results, API key checks).

🏗️ Architecture & Design Choices

Separation of concerns

UI (Streamlit) in streamlit_news_app.py
Business logic (API calls, parsing) in news_automator.py

Reliability

Try/except wrappers around API calls
Clear user messages for rate limits / invalid keys / no results
Configurable page size to avoid API overload

Minimal clicks to value (category → fetch → read)
Clean card-style article blocks with title, description, source, link
Consistent typography and spacing for readability

🔐 Secrets & Config

API key stored in .env via python-dotenv
Never hard-code keys; ignore .env in version control
Ready for Streamlit Cloud secrets if deploying there

🌐 Deployment Options

Local: streamlit run streamlit_news_app.py
Streamlit Cloud: Push to GitHub → set API_KEY as a secret → deploy
Docker (optional): Containerise for portability
Heroku / AWS / GCP / Azure: As a simple Python web service

✅ What I Learned

Designing a small but solid app that’s easy to read and extend
Handling the realities of rate limits / timeouts / empty payloads
Creating a professional UI quickly with Streamlit
Packaging portfolio projects with clear docs and clean structure

🔭 Roadmap / Improvements

Saved Searches & Bookmarks: Persist favourite topics
Multi-API fallback: If NewsAPI rate-limits, degrade gracefully
Scheduling & Caching: Faster reloads + fewer API calls
Topic modeling: Cluster related news (NLP)
Email/Slack digests: Daily/weekly summaries for selected topics
Dark mode toggle and theme presets

🔗 Links

Live Demo: (add link if deployed)
GitHub Repo: 📰 News Automator — Real-Time News Aggregator (Python + Streamlit)
Contact: info@adeyanjuteslim.co.uk

🧾 SEO (for this page)

Title: News Automator — Real-Time News Aggregator (Python + Streamlit)
Meta Description: A portfolio project by Teslim Adeyanju: real-time news app built with Python, Streamlit, and NewsAPI — featuring smart search, source browser, and a clean responsive UI.

📌 Badge (optional Notion block)

Status: Live • Tech: Python, Streamlit, NewsAPI • Focus: API integration, UI/UX, Error handling