Norwegian-Train-Price-Calendarinator

This project aims to generate a pricing calendar for Norwegian train connections and a price alert for changing prices. Unfortunetily, Entur does not plan to make their Price API publicly available, therefore we need to take their data by mining the website, which makes the project prune to design changes

Goals

This project should be able to get prices of train tickets in Norway and monitor changes of these prices

get all connections from A to B, including their prices
save prices and inform about changes via email

TODO

currently, it only searches for pricers for adults (voksen); should be able to search others (e.g. student) as well
it only informs about cheaper connections, this must not necessarily be the cheapest price of the day

Things which would be nice

make it more usable by either an UI or terminal parameter
Entur relies heavily on a weird URL format which requires for parameter for each station ([label, longitude, latitude, stopID]). Since three of them aren't obvious, there is a dictionary file in data/stations.txt which has some common stations in it. If yours is missing, add a new line in there. It might be possible to connect this to the station API of entur
relies on Google Chrome, maybe find something else (Raspberry Pi friendly)

Things to know

If there are two trains at the same time on the same day, it does not save information about both connections but only saves the cheaper one of them (treating them both as the same connection)

Run

install the requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
install chromium-browser and chromedriver: sudo apt-get install chromium-browser and sudo apt-get install chromium-chromedriver
run programme: python3 Enturinator.py
add connections to be observed into the database; if you want to use the predefined scripts, make sure to have sqlite3 installed and give the scripts rights to be executed (chmod +x *.sh)

Project Structure

Enturinator.py: main file
data/station.txt: information about stations
data/config.txt: contains configuration settings of the project
data/ObservedPrices.db: the database containing information about what to observe and historical prices
scripts/: A folder with some scripts to the database for getting current information and adding/deleting observation tasks

Data Format

Connection: station_from: string, station_to: string, price: int, departure: string, arrival: string, duration (min): int, description: str, exchanges: int, legs: List[tuple(str, str)]
Travelday: connections: List[Connection], date: str

Debug

There is an example file in the debug folder. Activate debug True in the config file such that it is not necessary to download the data every time you test something. This may also prevent you from being IP banned

Add connections to observe

To add a connection you want to observe, run the insertnewtask.sh (5 parameters) script in the script folder

To remove a connection, run the deletetask.sh (1 parameter) file

./insertnewtask.sh "Trondheim" "Bergen" "2023-10-10" "2023-10-11" "2023-09-01"
./deletetask.sh 4

Email

Create a configuration file at data/mailconfig.txt in the same way as the other configuration file. It should have the following content:

host	smtp.myserver.co.nz
port	465
mailaddress	yourmailaddress
password	yourpassword
emailTo	receiver

Run automatically

run crontab -e on your raspberry pi and add this line (remember to alter the paths): 0 0 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /home/pi/Bots/NorwegianTrainPriceCalendarinator/Enturinator.py >/dev/null 2>&1

Dabendorf/Norwegian-Train-Price-Calendarinator