lowtalker / swa-dashboard

Dashboard to monitor and receive alerts for changes in Southwest fare prices

SWA Dashboard

Dashboard to monitor and receive alerts for changes in Southwest fare prices.

Why?

I'm a lazy programmer who was tired of checking flight prices … and I really wanted to try out Twilio and blessed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Installation

Since I would rather not get in trouble for publishing this tool to npm, you can clone the repo locally and use npm link to use the executable.

cd wherever-you-cloned-it-to
npm link

If you recieve a SyntaxError: Unexpected token ... upon running the swa command, make sure you are running a version of node that supports ES6 syntax (5.11.0 and up).

Under some circumstances, libxmljs may throw an error that looks like this:

Error: Could not locate the bindings file. Tried:
 → /root/swa-dashboard/node_modules/libxmljs/build/xmljs.node

You can fix it and run swa successfully by rebuilding libxmljs manually:

sudo npm install -g node-gyp
cd node_modules/libxmljs
node-gyp rebuild

Usage

It will scrape Southwest's prices every n minutes (n = whatever interval you define via the --interval flag) and compare the results, letting you know the difference in price since the last interval. The default interval is 30 mins.

You may optionally set the --individual-deal-price flag, which will alert you if either fare price falls below the threshold you define. There is also the optional --total-deal-price flag, which will alert you if the combined total of both fares falls below the threshold. Other than --interval and the Twilio-related options, all other flags are required.

swa \
  --from 'DAL' \
  --to 'LGA' \
  --leave-date '11/01/2016' \
  --return-date '11/08/2016' \
  --passengers 2 \
  --individual-deal-price 50 \ # In dollars (optional)
  --total-deal-price 120 \ # In dollars (optional)
  --interval 5 # In minutes (optional)

Twilio integration

If you have a Twilio account (I'm using a free trial account) and you've set up a deal price threshold, you can set the following environment vars to set up SMS deal alerts. Just be warned: as long as the deal threshold is met, you're going to receive SMS messages at the rate of the interval you defined. Better wake up and book those tickets!

export TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID=""
export TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN=""
export TWILIO_PHONE_FROM=""
export TWILIO_PHONE_TO=""