VFS Germany Appointment Bot

A script to check the appointment slots.

By default, it runs every 2 minutes and check for visa slots at VFS website and notifies the user by SMS/call/Telegram.
The interval can be changed in the config.

How to use

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/ranjan-mohanty/vfs-appointment-bot.git
   
2. Move into the repo: cd vfs_appointment_bot
   
3. Update the config file (config/config.ini) with VFS, Twilio, Telegram credentials. Note that you can use either telegram, or twilio, or both. This can be specified with use_telegram and use_twilio config flags in same file.
4. Create a new virtual environment: python3 -m venv venv or by using conda conda create --name venv python=3.8
   
5. Activate the environment (might differ a bit for windows and MacOS): source venv/bin/activate / conda activate venv
   
6. Install the dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt
   
7. Run the script:

python vfs_appointment_bot/vfs_appointment_bot.py '<vfs_centre>' '<visa_category>' '<visa_subcategory>'

OR

python vfs_appointment_bot/vfs_appointment_bot.py

It will take the values as input from the user

** Please refer to the screenshot for more details regarding the inputs.

Dependency

1. Install Firefox Browser on your machine if not already installed.
2. geckodriver (instructions to install geckodriver are written below)
3. Setup client for Twilio/Telegram or both:
   • Create an account on Twilio to get text and call alerts. Sign up here for a trial account to get credits upto worth $10, OR
   • Create a new bot via Telegram and add it to a chat group where you want it to post messages to notify you. Check this simple tutorial out if you don't know how to create a new bot and get its credentials. Once bot is created you need to add its credentials in config/config.ini file.

How to install geckodriver

1. Run these the commands:

   • Linux (as an example) : wget https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/download/v0.18.0/geckodriver-v0.18.0-linux64.tar.gz

   (You can find the download URL to the latest release of geckodriver on Github. Check out their latest release here for your machine.)

2. Extract the file with

   tar -xvzf geckodriver*

3. Make it executable (note this shouldn't be necessary, unless the unzipped file doesn't have the execute bits set):

   chmod +x geckodriver

4. Add the driver to your PATH in ~/.bashrc so other tools can find it:

   export PATH=$PATH:/path-to-extracted-file/geckodriver

Contributors

• Ranjan Mohanty
• Bhavul Gauri