Table of Contents:

WCIF (WCA Competition Interchange Format)

This is currently under rapid flux.

Accessing WCA Website Data

The WCA doesn’t have an official API, but if you want to access data from the WCA website there are two options:

  1. The unofficial API (endorsed by WST!)
  2. Database exports

Unofficial API

If you want to query data from an API, we recommend using Robin Engelbrecht’s unofficial WCA API. While the API is unofficial, Robin has done excellent work and WST fully endorses it.

The API is based on the results export, and updates once per day.

Database Exports

We maintain two database exports:

  1. The results export (updated daily): https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/export/results
  2. The not so well known developer database export: https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/wst/wca-developer-database-dump.zip

The “results export” is used by tons of software, and is great if you want to run statistics against all the results ever achieved in competition. We try not to change it, and consequently it does not have some of the new interesting data that we’ve started tracking our database over the years.

The “developer database export” confusingly enough, is also publicly accessible. It is a production database dump with sensitive data (birthdays, emails, etc) removed. The schema should match exactly what’s in master’s structure.sql, so naturally, its schema changes with every database migration. This dump is used by WCA Software Team members for website development purposes, and third party developers who want to do interesting data analyses not possible with the public database export (for an example, see Jonatan Klosko’s awesome wca_statistics project).

Are you investigating bugs in the developer export?

See lib/database_dumper.rb and the relevant test and the corresponding rake file.

There are two commands to deal with the developer database export:

  1. bin/rake db:dump:development - Generates a dump of our database with sensitive information stripped, safe for public viewing.
  2. bin/rake db:load:development - Download and import the publicly accessible database dump from the production server.

We recently moved to Sidekiq for job processing - the link below may need to be changed.

db:dump:development automatically runs every 3 days in production.