govaccine is a small project I developed in just a few hours to monitor and automatically book appointment slots for COVID-19 shots (both first shot and booster shot) in France 🇫🇷.
It works with the online appointment platform Doctolib.
To comply with government rules, it only looks for "chronodoses" ⏱️, i.e. appointment slots which haven't been booked (or have been freed) less than 24 hours prior to the appointment. These chronodoses are allowed for all people above 18, unlike other shots.
Only Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are allowed for chronodoses and the algorithm actually only checks for Pfizer-BioNTech at this time (Pfizer-BioNTech is the most widespread in Paris vaccination centers currently, I didn't take time to make it work with Moderna).
govaccine is much faster 🚀 than browser-based solutions (browser extensions, web automation tools like Selenium, etc.) because it's 100% headless: there is no interaction with external systems other than Doctolib's API.
The program is working as of May 26th 2021, however changes to the Doctolib API or content might break it.
First, you need to create a text file containing all the Doctolib URLs of the vaccination centers you're interested in, one URL per line. You can find these URLs by searching for vaccination centers on the Doctolib website and copying the URl shown in your browser. Example:
https://www.doctolib.fr/vaccination-covid-19/paris/centre-de-vaccination-covid-paris-15e
https://www.doctolib.fr/vaccination-covid-19/paris/centre-de-vaccination-cpam-de-paris
https://www.doctolib.fr/vaccination-covid-19/paris/centre-de-vaccination-paris-14e
A file is already provided with all Paris vaccination centers in ./assets/paris_vaccination_centers.txt. You can use it if you want to get vaccinated in Paris. You will need to create your own text file for other places, as explained above.
Then, run the program: ./govaccine -u EMAIL -p PASSWORD -f PATH_TO_YOUR_VACCINATION_CENTERS_TEXTFILE
The program will exit once an appointment has been booked.
Full usage:
Usage of govaccine:
-f string
Filepath of a file containing the URLs of the desired vaccination centers (1 URL per line)
-p string
Doctolib password
-s uint
Number of seconds between each appointment check for a single worker (default 1)
-t uint
Number of seconds after which a request times out (default 5)
-u string
Doctolib username (email)
-w uint
Number of workers checking for appointments concurrently (default 4)
The program only communicates with doctolib.fr in HTTPS (HTTP Secure). No data is sent anywhere else and no data is stored by the program.
As its name suggests, govaccine is written in Go... solely because I wanted to practice Go (so the code might not be very idiomatic).
To compile the program, go to the ./cmd/govaccine/ directory and execute go build . This will create the govaccine executable file which you can run as explained above.
govaccine assumes the appointment is confirmed and exits as long as it issued the request to confirm the appointment (without actually checking the response of the request).
If someone else is booking the same appointment and confirms it first, this will cause govaccine to believe you got the appointment and exit (while in fact the appointment was given to someone else).
The workaround is simply to re-run govaccine to book another appointment.
This issue hasn't been fixed yet because one needs to know the response returned by the API in the case described above, which is not easy to reproduce.