I'm looking for maintainers. Nevermind, a bot would work.

Further development has been moved to the v2 branch.

Notes

We're using Protobuf strings to generate the tfs query parameter, which stores all the information for a lookup request. We then parse the HTML content and extract the info we need.

Generally speaking, using the requests module with naively-inserted User-Agent headers to scrape Google websites is a horrible idea since it's too easy to detect on the server-side. I've been blocked once, and it lasted for almost 3 months. If you're looking to be more stable, I recommend using proxies or replace the requests module in the source code to primp, which is a scraper yet highly optimized for browser impersonation. Since primp doesn't come with type annotations, you may create a file named primp.py importing the necessary items (Client) and constructing a blank class for Response, which is not directly importable from primp. Type definitions (.pyi) for primp:

Basics

TL;;DR: To use fast-flights, you'll first create a filter (for ?tfs=) to perform a request. Then, add flight_data, trip, seat, passengers, and (optional) max_stops info to use the API directly.

from fast_flights import FlightData, Passengers, create_filter, get_flights

# Create a new filter
filter = create_filter(
    flight_data=[
        # Include more if it's not a one-way trip
        FlightData(
            date="2024-07-02",  # Date of departure
            from_airport="TPE", 
            to_airport="MYJ"
        ),
        # ... include more for round trips
    ],
    trip="one-way",  # Trip (round-trip, one-way)
    seat="economy",  # Seat (economy, premium-economy, business or first)
    passengers=Passengers(
        adults=2,
        children=1,
        infants_in_seat=0,
        infants_on_lap=0
    ),
    max_stops=None  # or specify number
)

# Get flights with a filter
result = get_flights(filter)

# The price is currently... low/typical/high
print("The price is currently", result.current_price)

CLI: A command-line example script is included as example.py. Usage is as follows:

python3 example.py --origin LAX --destination LGA --depart_date 2025-2-26 --return_date 2025-02-29 --max_stops 1

Information: Display additional information.

# Get the first flight
flight = result.flights[0]

flight.is_best
flight.name
flight.departure
flight.arrival
flight.arrival_time_ahead
flight.duration
flight.stops
flight.delay?  # may not be present
flight.price

Useless enums: Additionally, you can use the Airport enum to search for airports in code (as you type)! See _generated_enum.py in source.

Airport.TAIPEI
              |---------------------------------|
              | TAIPEI_SONGSHAN_AIRPORT         |
              | TAPACHULA_INTERNATIONAL_AIRPORT |
              | TAMPA_INTERNATIONAL_AIRPORT     |
              | ... 5 more                      |
              |---------------------------------|

Preflights: We may request to the server twice as sometimes the initial request would not return any results. When this happens, it counts as a preflight agent and we'll send another request to the server as they build data. You can think of this as a "cold start."

Cookies & consent

The EU region is a bit tricky to solve for now, I'll find workarounds soon.

How it's made

The other day, I was making a chat-interface-based trip recommendation app and wanted to add a feature that can search for flights available for booking. My personal choice is definitely Google Flights since Google always has the best and most organized data on the web. Therefore, I searched for APIs on Google.

🔎 Search
google flights api

The results? Bad. It seems like they discontinued this service and it now lives in the Graveyard of Google.

^{🧏‍♂️ duffel.com
Google Flights API: How did it work & what happened to it?}

The Google Flights API offered developers access to aggregated airline data, including flight times, availability, and prices. Over a decade ago, Google announced the acquisition of ITA Software Inc. which it used to develop its API. However, in 2018, Google ended access to the public-facing API and now only offers access through the QPX enterprise product.

That's awful! I've also looked for free alternatives but their rate limits and pricing are just 😬 (not a good fit/deal for everyone).

However, Google Flights has their UI – flights.google.com. So, maybe I could just use Developer Tools to log the requests made and just replicate all of that? Undoubtedly not! Their requests are just full of numbers and unreadable text, so that's not the solution.

Perhaps, we could scrape it? I mean, Google allowed many companies like Serpapi to scrape their web just pretending like nothing happened... So let's scrape our own.

🔎 Search
google flights api scraper pypi

Excluding the ones that are not active, I came across hugoglvs/google-flights-scraper on Pypi. I thought to myself: "aint no way this is the solution!"

I checked hugoglvs's code on GitHub, and I immediately detected "playwright," my worst enemy. One word can describe it well: slow. Two words? Extremely slow. What's more, it doesn't even run on the 🗻 Edge because of configuration errors, missing libraries... etc. I could just reverse try.playwright.tech and use a better environment, but that's just too risky if they added Cloudflare as an additional security barrier 😳.

Life tells me to never give up. Let's just take a look at their URL params...

https://www.google.com/travel/flights/search?tfs=CBwQAhoeEgoyMDI0LTA1LTI4agcIARIDVFBFcgcIARIDTVlKGh4SCjIwMjQtMDUtMzBqBwgBEgNNWUpyBwgBEgNUUEVAAUgBcAGCAQsI____________AZgBAQ&hl=en

I removed the ?tfs= parameter and found out that this is the control of our request! And it looks so base64-y.

If we decode it to raw text, we can still see the dates, but we're not quite there — there's too much unwanted Unicode text.

Or maybe it's some kind of a data-storing method Google uses? What if it's something like JSON? Let's look it up.

🔎 Search
google's json alternative

🐣 Result
Solution: The Power of Protocol Buffers

LinkedIn turned to Protocol Buffers, often referred to as protobuf, a binary serialization format developed by Google. The key advantage of Protocol Buffers is its efficiency, compactness, and speed, making it significantly faster than JSON for serialization and deserialization.

Gotcha, Protobuf! Let's feed it to an online decoder and see how it does:

🔎 Search
protobuf decoder

🐣 Result
protobuf-decoder.netlify.app

I then pasted the Base64-encoded string to the decoder and no way! It DID return valid data!

I immediately recognized the values — that's my data, that's my query!

So, I wrote some simple Protobuf code to decode the data.

syntax = "proto3"

message Airport {
    string name = 2;
}

message FlightInfo {
    string date = 2;
    Airport dep_airport = 13;
    Airport arr_airport = 14;
}

message GoogleSucks {
    repeated FlightInfo = 3;
}

It works! Now, I won't consider myself an "experienced Protobuf developer" but rather a complete beginner.

I have no idea what I wrote but... it worked! And here it is, fast-flights.

Contributing

Yes, please: github.com/AWeirdDev/flights

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(c) AWeirdDev