slotmonitor

Cowin slot monitoring program for Covid Vaccination. The program does what it says, monitors the slots for a person for a specific state and district and sends out details of the same over Telegram.

Setup steps

In order to setup this program, no extra libraries are required to be installed, unless the Python installation is having a minimal package list.

Note: It is better to create a Python virtual environment while setting this program up.

Steps:

1. [Optional] Create a Virtual Environment for Python 3.x
2. Clone this repository.
3. Create the Telegram bot
4. Edit and update the configuration file(config.json).
5. Run the program

Configuration file details

The configuration file (config.json) present in the repository is read by the program in order to send the updates to the users. A sample configuration is already present in the file and looks as follows:

{
	"users": [
		{
			"name" : "firstname-middlename-lastname",
			"age": 18,
			"state": "state as per Cowin portal",
			"district": "district as per Cowin portal",
			"enabled": true,
			"chat_id": 1234567898
		}
	],
	"bot_token": "telegram_bot_token"
}

Any number of users can be added under the users key. Each should contain the name of the user, the preferred age group or the age of the user itself, the state as per the listing in Cowin portal, the district as per the Cowin portal and then the chat_id of the person with the Telegram bot. This can be obtained by calling the getUpdates endpoint of the Telegram API.

enabled field, if set to true will allow for sending updates to the users, false will not allow for sending the messages to the users.

Configuring the Telegram bot token

In order to obtain the telegram bot access token, one has to initiate a conversation with @BotFather on Telegram and issue the command /newbot. On doing so and following the responses from BotFather, the telegram bot will be created. This access token needs to be provided in the configuration file for the bot_token key.

Running the program

In order to run the program in normal mode, just execute the file : mon.py. In order to debug the program run, execute the file with debug option : mon.py -d or mon.py --debug. This will ensure debugging is enabled and the same can be seen in the log files.

Note: In the normal mode, the program logs INFO logs only; in DEBUG mode, the logging is extensive and uses a lot of space in HDD. If you are planning to set it up on a server, please refrain from executing the program in DEBUG mode.