#CVS Vaccine Text Alert (New York)

This tool sends a text message to the number in ./phone-number.txt using the Textbelt API with a NY CVS location that has available appointments from the list of locations in towns.txt.

This script allows you to repeatably refresh the CVS COVID-19 vaccine page to see what locations have vaccines available. This does not book a vaccine appointment. Instead, it sends a text message with the sign-up link and which location had available bookings. I built this for my senior parents who could not possible refresh the CVS website consistently or correctly. It's recommended that you run this on a cronjob that isn't too frequent that it exhausts the API endpoint or too infrequently where it could possibly miss an available booking.

This project does not allow users of it to skip the vaccination line. You will still need to sign-up manually through the CVS website in order to get a vaccine appointment.

#Required files

The following files are required:

• towns.txt
• phone-number.txt
• textbelt-api-key.txt
• api-endpoint.txt
• header-user-agent.txt
• header-referer.txt
• cookie-data.txt

Once you've created those files, you have to populate them with the expected values. Some of these values can be gleaned from the Inspector Tools > Network tab when the state is picked on the web page.

#towns.txt

This is a newline-delimited list of the towns in NY that you would like to set an alert for. eg.

WOODSTOCK
ALBANY
NEW ROCHELLE
OSWEGO

#phone-number.txt

This is a numerical phone number without any other characters. eg. 5551234567.

#textbelt-api-key.txt

This is an API key provided by Textbelt.

#api-endpoint.txt

This is a URL that CVS uses on modal open to retrieve the JSON result for a given state.

#header-user-agent.txt

The User-Agent: header used by your browser for the initial request.

#header-referer.txt

The Referer: header used by your browser for the initial request.

#cookie-data.txt

The Cookie: header used by your browser for the initial request.

#Example config files

If you're more of a visual learner, here's an example of the necessary config files in a gist you can download and populate yourself.

#Other states

It's possible to support other states without much modification to the main logic to the script. The API endpoint should contain a two-letter abbreviation for the state you are looking for info on. By modifying that value to another two-letter abbreviation for a given state, the results should change to that given state. You need to modify the jq statement to use the new two-letter abbreviation for the API call.