This repository has the code to check if the website of the Immigration office in Hannover has changed and has appointments available. It will send a message to my Telegram if there is a change so that I can use the website and get an appointment fast.
The repository contains a flask application with a daemon inside that will check the website every minute and if it detects that the website has available appointments it will send a message using Telegram to an existing chatbot. The repository contains all the settings for a free Heroku deployment. However, it is my understanding that this free tier will finish soon, therefore, it might not be free anymore and/or even not work. On the other side the code can run locally too without any required changes and since it is not a consumption API, the flask development server will do just fine.
The application is using the factory patter from flask, which is why instead if running the app like a python module, it is recommended to run it using the flask command directly. The simplest way to run the application without specific settings would be the following command:
flask run
This command should be executed in the root folder and should start the flask environment with the application. As above, this is not a high consumption API, which means that the flask default server will do the trick.
In order to use this application, one needs to create an account in Telegram and a chat-bot in it. This post is a good example of the required steps to have a working bot in Telegram to communicate to. Since the application is in Python, and it is a web application, one of the easiest ways to communicate to a phone and alert it of the availability of appointments is to use this chat communication to Telegram.
The steps are the following:
- Create a Telegram account or login to yours
- Go to Settings and create an ID
- Send a message to RawDataBot (that is a contact name one can find in the browser)
- Copy your ID from the response
- Search for BotFather and send
/start. This will provide instructions to create a new bot with/newbot - Copy the access token from the response, this is necessary for all future communications
In the environmental variables of this project you must specify the token and the ID. There is an example file
.env.example with the names of both. Either create as variables from the terminal before running the program,
or create a .env file with these two variables and their values. This will allow the code to execute without error.
Additionally, it will send messages to your bot and only your bot.
TODO