SCSC-Portal-Scaper

A simple AWS Lambda middleware for querying the Santa Clara County Superior Court public portal.

Try it out!

Example Request:

curl --request POST \
  --url https://3ntn7l7uuhudt24bryqceq5f2y0iobzl.lambda-url.us-west-2.on.aws/api/search \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{
  "firstName": "Jose",
  "lastName": "Garcia"
}'

Example Response:

{
  "timestamp": "2025-11-13T03:32:25.3638255Z",
  "data": [
    {
      "caseNumber": "25CV479555",
      "name": "Capital One, N.a. vs Jose Garcia",
      "filingDate": "11/7/2025",
      "status": "Active",
      "type": "Collections Rule 3.740 Limited (09) - under 10,000",
      "courtLocation": "Civil",
      "parties": [
        {
          "name": " Capital One, N.a.",
          "role": "Plaintiff"
        },
        {
          "name": "Jose A Garcia",
          "role": "Defendant"
        }
      ],
      "hearings": null,
      "fines": null,
      "fees": null,
      "balance": null,
      "caseUrl": "https://portal.scscourt.org/case/NTg5Mzc0OA==",
      "scrapeTimestamp": "2025-11-13T08:52:27.823Z"
    }
  ]
}

Getting Started

Open in Codespaces ✨

Get started in browser

Run locally

Run nvm install if you don't already have Node 24 LTS installed

yarn install

yarn dev

Docker

docker build -t vigilant-guacamole .

then

docker run -p 3000:3000 vigilant-guacamole

Deploying

Make sure your .env contains:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Or authenticate with OSS Serverless however you prefer.

Your AWS Secrets Manager will need a Plaintext entry for your legally obtained scscourt_key if you wish to query the live portal.

Then yarn sls:deploy

Undeploying

yarn sls:remove

Docs

/api/search

!! Don't forget to head it with content-type as application/json !!

{
    firstName: "",
    lastName: ""
}

Access & Anti-Bot Strategy (Legal and Operational)

How you verified whether scraping is permitted (robots.txt, terms of use, or by contacting the site owner).

portal.scscourt.org has no robots.txt or Terms of Service, though we can reasonably assume it is covered by scscourt.org/robots.txt and courts.ca.gov/about/terms-use.

The robots.txt disallows crawling /search. Although robots.txt does not cover subdomains, this project nonetheless does not programmatically call portal.scscourt.org/search.

The terms-use clearly states that the use of bots or data mining is explicitly forbidden. As such, this project and the demo make no requests to the site unless you have an authorized API key.

The creation of this project itself, for personal non-commercial purposes (granted, for a technical interview), should fall within fair use.

Your compliant approach to access limits and geo-restrictions.

This project makes no effort to circumvent geo-restrictions. To my knowledge, scscourt.org does not place geo-restrictions on browsing from my home internet.

Ensure you deploy your Lambda to an AWS region approved by the Santa Clara County Superior Court.

How mock-mode (offline fixtures) and live-mode are managed.

The source code uses offline fixtures unless you set up a scscourt_key in your AWS Secrets.

The live demo always uses offline fixtures.

Your safeguards for proxy or networking design (without any bypass methods).

To prevent excessive crawling, this project only finds detailed case data for the most recently filed case.

(It should only find the most recent filed case; however, the portal returns all results at once, so the fixture contains multiple cases.)

A clear statement confirming that no security protections were circumvented.

No security protections were circumvented in the creation of this project.