How I Transformed my Job Offer Monitoring System into a COVID-19 Vaccine Appointment Monitoring Bot
In France, the only way to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is to make a digital appointment on https://www.doctolib.fr/. As I’m sure most of us can relate, my grandmother who is 94 years old missed the digital revolution and finds it impossible to navigate technology in today’s modern era. I wanted to help her and make this appointment for her. Unfortunately, when I went to do so there were no available time slots available…
Rewind to a few months ago when I created a python bot to monitor job offers from companies I was interested in working for. I decided to tweak this bot to monitor and notify me when the next COVID-19 vaccine appointment would be available. I would like to share this code with you.
If you would like to implement this, first have a look at my tutorial for creating a job offer monitoring system here. Going forward with altering the code — the only difference is the new_vaccin and the wrapper function.
This function returns true if there is an available appointment slot. More exactly, it returns true if it doesn’t find the sentence “New appointment will be available soon” on the home page. Then, the wrapper function triggers a new email notification. Super easy!
This function is scheduled 3 times a day with a CRON job.
If you do try this out please be nice to https://www.doctolib.fr/ as they surely don’t want to be scrapped every few seconds… This could be an easy side project for lovely grandchildren who want to help their grandparents stay safe during this crazy time (and to learn how to code!)
You can find all my code in this repo: