open-classes

Python program to automate finding open class sections on the Baruch College CUNYfirst Student Center.

Purpose: When I enrolled at Baruch College for my master's, I had a hard time finding open seats in the classes I wanted to take my first semester. 100% of the seats were filled in a number of key prerequisite classes! Dismayed but not discouraged, I wrote this Python program to continually poll the CUNYfirst website for open seats in classes I wanted. As soon as a seat opened up, the program sent me a text message alerting me so I could sign up for the course and grab the open seat before it disappeared!

Results: I grabbed open seats in two of the classes I wanted using this program.

Author's note: I wrote this before actually taking a formal class in Python, so some of the coding style might be a bit unconventional. I don't have a real use for this script now, so I haven't been motivated to clean it up, but I'm still posting the code here for posterity.

How it works: this script uses webdriver to run a headless (no window) instance of Chrome. It also uses the Twilio SMS API to send text messages.

To run, you will need to modify the script to:

• Use your login credentials
• Search for sections of the classes you are interested in
• Use your Twilio SMS API credentials (sign up for a free acount here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/api)
• Just use the start_script.sh shell script to run the program. The shell script restarts the program if it crashes due to anything unusual happening (e.g. the CUNYfirst page not loading properly).

Making changes to main.py

• Adjust the the find_open_classes() function arguments to be whatever class you are looking for. Call the function multiple times if you are looking for multiple classes.

Making changes to open_classes.py

Login:

• Add your username and password in the appropriate places noted in login_to_CUNYfirst().

Twilio API: define the following variables in send_text_message():

• account_sid
• auth_token
• from_
• to

Note: open_classes.py also includes commented out code for an earlier version of the script that used opentextingonline.com to send text messages instead of the Twilio API.