Spices Board India Small Cardamom Auctions

Read official public small-cardamom auction results: auction date and auctioneer, lot count, arrived/sold kilograms, and minimum/maximum/average INR-per-kg prices. Useful for commodity reporting, purchasing research and historical comparison. Not investment advice.

Quick start

Default input {} reads the latest page, returning up to 10 auctions. For two pages use:

{"maxPages": 2, "maxItems": 20}

For a bounded date-filtered scan:

{"maxPages": 10, "maxItems": 100, "dateFrom": "2026-09-01", "dateTo": "2026-09-30"}

• maxPages: 1–20, default 1. Starts at the latest page and follows only the site's explicit next-page links.
• maxItems: 1–200, default 10. Maximum output auctions.
• dateFrom, dateTo: optional inclusive YYYY-MM-DD filters. They filter only the visited pages, not the entire archive. A narrow older date range may return no rows when the page bound is too small.

Pages are serially requested at least two seconds apart, respecting any longer robots crawl delay/request rate. There is one initial robots request (plus at most one same-origin homepage redirect) and at most maxPages auction requests. Responses are capped at 2 MB. No login, CAPTCHA solving, rotating proxies, alternative APIs or retries. All non-200 responses except that narrowly allowed robots redirect, other redirects, access challenges and malformed table structures stop with a failed run.

Output and precision

One dataset row per distinct published auction fact set. auctionDate is the source's calendar date, without invented timezone conversion. observedAt is UTC extraction time. Price and weight fields are exact decimal strings: "3836.00" preserves published precision. Missing numeric cells become JSON null; zero remains zero, never missing. lots and sourceSerial are integers or null. Raw cell strings are retained in rawValues.

Fields include recordId, auctionDate, auctioneer, lots, arrivedKg, soldKg, maxPriceInrPerKg, minPriceInrPerKg, averagePriceInrPerKg, currency (INR), priceUnit (INR/kg), weightUnit (kg), commodity, attribution and source URLs.

The SHA-256 recordId derives from date, auctioneer and numeric auction facts, excluding page-relative serial and observation time. Different auctioneers or different facts on the same date survive deduplication. The source exposes no durable auction identifier; indistinguishable exact duplicates are collapsed, while revisions create a new record ID. This is a bounded current snapshot, not a revision-history service. Repeat-page and URL-loop detection prevent cycling.

The OUTPUT key-value record describes pages, request count, rows, stop reason and robots status. On a source failure the Actor fails and does not claim complete coverage or publish accumulated rows.

Attribution and source access

Source: Spices Board India. Website policy permits accurate reproduction with attribution and excludes separately credited third-party material. This Actor extracts factual auction rows only, not newspaper-sourced market-price material or long prose.

On 7 October 2026, /robots.txt redirected to the same-origin homepage, which returned an ordinary HTML page rather than machine-readable directives. This is recorded as unavailable_html, not explicit permission. The Actor can read the ordinary public auction pages in that situation; if valid robots directives are returned, it enforces them. Any access-denial/challenge markup or HTTP error at the robots endpoint stops the run. Unknown non-HTML malformed robots responses stop as well.

Development and testing

python -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements-dev.txt
.venv/bin/python -m unittest discover -s tests -v
.venv/bin/python -m src.main

.actor/ declares official Apify input and dataset metadata. Tests validate those against snapshots of the official Apify metaschemas and validate every genuine fixture row against the actual dataset fields schema. Sanitized fixtures retain just public auction tables and pagination. Tests cover current facts, two-page traversal, loops, duplicate pages, header drift, date/input validation, missing/zero values, precision, distinct same-day facts, access denials, robots and bounded requests.

smoke/latest.json and smoke/two-pages.json are small suggested hosted smoke inputs. No hosted run, upload or Apify spend is part of this local build. review/ contains local test and runtime evidence. The Dockerfile pins the Python major/minor base and requirements pins the SDK/Crawlee/Pydantic runtime versions; transitive dependencies/base-image updates are not a full reproducible lock.