/116117bot

A proof of concept bot, checking impfterminservice.de for available COVID-19 vaccination appointments.

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

116117bot

🔥 Current status

This script has been largely broken since March 9, when Impfterminservice.de introduced a bunch of anti-scraping measures.

What is this?

The 116117 Impfterminservice provides COVID-19 vaccination appointments for a wide range of German states. Unfortunately, it does not alert registered users when appointments become available, so users are required to manually monitor it. This is a proof of concept for a simple Puppeteer-powered bot that monitors the site and alerts via STDOUT and optionally push notification once appointments are available.

🦠 The 116117 booking engine changes regularly and this bot may be non-functional. It is more intended as a proof-of-concept and inspiration for own experiments than as a single point of truth, best practice or ready-for-use script. Please use it responsibly and read the complete Readme beforehand. PRs and issues will only be monitored sporadically.

You may also like…

…my project Impfterminmonitor.de, which provides an easy way to track appointment availability using a clean web interface.

Requirements

  • Node.js (>v14)
  • If you want to receive push notifications for available appointments, a Pushover account.
  • One or multiple URLs to be monitored (see below).

Input URLs

116117bot requires one or multiple URLs to be monitored as its input. Right now, two types of URLs are supported:

  1. URLs like https://123-iz.impfterminservice.de/impftermine/service?plz=12345. You are redirected to these in the browser after you have selected a location for vaccination on impfterminservice.de. You can copy them from the browser address bar.
  2. URLs like https://123-iz.impfterminservice.de/terminservice/suche/XXXX-XXXX-XXXX/12345/. These are provided via e-mail after elegibility for a vaccination has been confirmed. Attention: Since a recent change of the booking engine, monitoring URLs like this immediately results in reserved appointments, making them unavailable to the public. I therefore advise against monitoring personalized URLs like this one using the bot.

Configuration

116117bot reads all configuration from environment variables. Only one is actually required:

Variable Required Default Description
URLS The URLs to be monitored (see above). If you provide more than one separated by commas, they will be checked round-robin style.
PUSHOVER_TOKEN If you want to receive alerts via Pushover, the app token generated there.
PUSHOVER_USER If you want to receive alerts via Pushover, the recipient ID (user or group) generated there.
TIMEOUT_REGULAR 300 The number of seconds 116117bot will wait between polls.
TIMEOUT_ERROR 300 The number of seconds 116117bot will pause in case an error has been encountered during a poll.
NO_PUPPETEER_SANDBOX false Set this to true to run Puppeteer without a sandbox. This is required for some hosting services.
LOG_HTML false Set this to true to log raw HTML from polls (if it has changed).
HEADLESS false Set this to true to run Puppeteer in headless mode.
PORT 3000 The port 116117bot will run on. It is not actively used at this point, but should still be available.

Installing dependencies

$ npm install

Startup

$ npm start

Run inside a docker container

Build the docker container inside the repository folder:

$ docker build -t 116117bot .

Run the docker container:

$ docker run --name 116117bot -e URLS="YourUrlHere" 116117bot