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faizulhai24 / cowin-vaccine-slot-checker

This is a Python script which will help you to know when a slot is available on Cowin website.
Apache License 2.0
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cowin-vaccine-slot-checker

This is a Python script which will help you to know when a slot is available on Cowin website.

This script has been tested with Python version 3.6, 3.8 on Linux/MacOs. In case you want to run it with Python 2.7 or Windows, some changes might be required.

Features:

  1. Find any open slots and print it in the terminal and optionally write to a file.
  2. (Optional) Run the script as a cron job (Linux/MacOS) which will periodically check for the slots.
  3. (Optional) Run the script as a cron job (Linux/MacOS), you can get an alert whenever a slot frees up.
  4. (Optional) Run cron_windows.bat (Windows), to periodically check for slots.
  5. (Optional) Open the self registration page when free slots are found for faster registration.
  6. (Optional) Can be configured to check for bot 18+ and 45+ age groups. (Default Behaviour)

The main code is in the file slot_checker.py. Rest everything is optional in case you want to run it as a cron job.

Configurations:

Explanation for all the configuration that can be found in slot_checker.py

Config Info
DISTRICT_IDS This is the list of districts to check for free slot. You can get your district id in DISTRICT_LISTS. Example. [(294, "BBMP"), (265, "Bengaluru Urban")] will find slots in BBMP and Bengaluru Urban districts. Change this id and name to your district.
WRITE_TO_FILE Optional. Write the free slots to a file. Default: True
FILE_NAME Optional. File to which to write the open slots to. Default: "vaccine.txt"
FILE_OPEN Optional. Wheater to open the file, if WRITE_TO_FILE is enabled.
ALARM Optional. This will ring an alarm when free slots are found. Default: True
NUM_WEEKS No of weeks starting today to check the slots in. Default: 5
MIN_AGE Array that can used to check for 18-44 or 45+ age groups. Default : Both
OPEN_PAGE Optional. This will open the self registration page when free slots are found. Default: True

Steps to run:

  1. Clone the repository
  2. Run pip install -r requirements.txt
  3. Change the above defined configurations in slot_checker.py
  4. Run the script using python3 slot_checker.py

Steps to run a cron job periodically (Linux/MacOS):

Cron job are periodic jobs that will run silently in the background automatically. There is a cron helper script slot_script.sh in the repo, however you might have to make some changes to cron_script according to your environment.

  1. Go to the terminal and run crontab -e
  2. Add this line * * * * * <PATH_TO_THE_REPO>/cron_script.sh
  3. You can change the periodicity. Just a regular cron expression. The above one will execute every 1 minute.
  4. (Optional) If you want to disable the terminal mail for every cron job run add MAILTO=""" above the previous command.

Note: There is MIN_CAPACITY config in the main file. Change it to maybe 5, so that your laptop does not keep alerting you when a single slot opens up because most likely it is going to filled by the time you sign in onto the portal.

Note: To check if this cron is running properly, you can check if the file with FILE_NAME got created. Another way is to check terminal mail. The terminal is going to create a mail for every time the cron runs. To check, go to terminal and run mail.