A bit late to this conversation (well, the extension of it :p), but I also wanted to pull data from a discourse forum and didn’t want the hassle of setting up an API key, if you (or anyone) wants a simple wrapper to pull posts from any discourse forum you can check it our here
Released on PyPi so easy to install with pip/uv, handles rate limiting for you and is typed with Pydantic (makes for a better DX imo). Usage:
from discourse_reader import DiscourseClient
client = DiscourseClient("https://meta.discourse.org")
# Browse categories
for cat in client.categories():
print(f"{cat.name}: {cat.topic_count} topics")
# Get a topic with all its posts
topic = client.topics.get(12345)
print(topic.title)
print(topic.opening_post.cooked) # the original post (HTML)
print(topic.accepted_answer) # accepted answer or None
for reply in topic.posts.replies():
print(reply.username, reply.cooked)
Not as extensive as pydiscoursebut that’s intentional since it works without an API key, it also definitely won’t offer better or faster data than the data explorer plugin but I think it’s nice if you just wanna quickly pull a batch of threads of simple site statistics 