Short python script to scrape the Spanish consulate's appointment website to find the earliest range of open appointments, written by Christopher Woods.
All configuration (login, phone numbers, etc.) should be placed in a secrets.py file in the main directory, which for obvious security reasons has not been included in the git repository.
The secrets.py file should be formatted as:
USERNAME = 'username'
PASSWORD = 'password'
TO_NUMBER = '+15558675309'
FROM_NUMBER = '+17732025000'
TWILIO_SID = 'AC------'
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN = '----------'
TWILIO_SID and TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN refer to the tokens given from Twilio, the SMS messaging service that this script uses to send texts when an open appointment is found.
As such, the TO_NUMBER is the number that you want the SMS text message sent to, while the FROM_NUMBER is also given by Twilio.
USERNAME and PASSWORD refer to the login credentials for the Spanish consulate website.
Required packages:
bs4for webscraping with BeautifulSouprequeststo query the websitetwilioto send SMS text messages
Once those are installed with something like pip, and the secrets.py file is set up, the program can be run with python main.py.
Ideally this should be set up to run on a cron job, with a crontime something like */10 * * * * (set to run every 10 minutes).
If this is run on a cron job, it is set up to send out daily alerts at 8 AM and 6 PM to tell the user that the service is still running, along with sending out a text every time an appointment is found some time in 2019.