TAC Extract
An automated crawler for the Texas Administrative Code
If you're seeing this page, you've likely looked up the IP address behind a
crawler visiting
texas-sos.appianportalsgov.com. This page explains who we are
and what we're doing.
What is this?
TAC Extract is a tool that downloads the full text of the Texas Administrative Code (TAC) from the Secretary of State's portal. The TAC is the codification of all state agency rules in Texas—public law that affects millions of people.
Why does this exist?
The official TAC portal renders all content client-side using JavaScript. It offers no API, no bulk download, and no data export. This makes the regulations effectively inaccessible to researchers, developers, legal professionals, and anyone who needs to work with the text programmatically.
Our goal is to make Texas administrative law available in standard, open formats—JSON, XML, and USLM—so it can be searched, analyzed, compared, and built upon.
Goals
- Provide complete, structured copies of the TAC in open data formats
- Enable full-text search across all Texas administrative rules
- Support legal research, policy analysis, and civic technology
- Preserve a public, machine-readable record of state regulations
This crawler is respectful. It introduces random delays between requests, limits its crawl rate, retries gracefully on errors, and immediately stops on rate-limit responses. It does not scrape personal data—only the text of public regulations.
How it works
The crawler uses a headless browser to load each rule page, intercepts the internal API response containing the rule text, and saves it as a structured JSON file. It follows "Next Rule" links to walk through the code sequentially, skipping rules it has already downloaded.
Contact
If you have questions or concerns about this crawler, contact webmaster at esc13 dot net.