savaccine

What is this page?

This project is used to show availablity of the COVID-19 vaccine in San Antonio, TX at the website http://sanantoniovaccine.com. It can be adapted for other cities.

How does it work?

Vaccine provider websites in a configuration file are periodically queried by a Python script to look for current availability. The status is written to a file, which is then ready by a PHP file for display on a website.

index.php is the website, vaccineChecker.py is the background task for querying the websites. See respective README information at the top index.php / vaccineChecker.py, along with vaccineChecker.py --help.

An example file input/websites.json is provided in this source tree. The sites in websites.json can be one of four type values:

• phrase : Looks for the presence or absence of phrases specified by pos_phrase or neg_phrase.
• cvs: Queries the cvs.com website with with the state and city parameters supplied.
• heb: Queries the heb.com website with with the city parameter supplied.
• walgreens: Queries the walgreens.com website with with the query parameter supplied.

What if I want to use it for my city?

The setup is not a one-click-easy-button, but it's not too complicated:

Prerequisites

• have a Linux server with:
  • PHP (v5.5 known to work)
  • Python (v3.4.3 known to work)
  • Python dependencies in the imports of vaccineChecker.py (a.k.a. pip install....)
  • if you include walgreens as a type in websites.json, you need the selenium Python package and the Linux Firefox geckodriverdriver for the OS. The script assumes the geckodriver binary is in the path. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/851401/where-to-find-geckodriver-needed-by-selenium-python-package for setup. If you are not including walgreens as a type, you don't need this.

Step 1

• download and extract a copy of this repository to a location NOT served by the web server. example:

/home/[your-user]/savaccine/
  .gitignore
  LICENSE
  README.md
  index.php
  vaccineChecker.py
  input/
    README.md
    websites.json
  status/
    README.md

Step 2

• in the extracted directory:
  • if you would like notifications to an email with script status to be sent, as enabled by the --notification-rate argument, create your own credentials.json file and pass it to the script with --credentials. See README in vaccineChecker.py for format. This is optional.
  • modify input/websites.json for the websites you wish to monitor
  • run vaccineChecker.py as a background task

Step 3

• after running vaccineChecker.py at least once, so it creates status/status.json, create a new directory to be served by the webserver. within this new directory, create softlinks to index.php and status.json. example:

/var/www/html/savaccine/
  index.php -> /home/[your-user]/savaccine/index.php
  status.json -> /home/[your-user]/savaccine/status/status.json

Step 4

• view index.php on your site! debug, test, repeat!