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.

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"
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	Minimum age limit. Default: 18. Can be changed to 45 for senior people.

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.