A simple script to check for SFO GlobalEntry interview timeslots.

People sometimes cancel their interviews, leaving a new opening for someone else to schedule themselves into. Most openings are snapped up within a few minutes (or faster). So I recommend opening the TTP login page and babysitting the script for a few hours while doing something else on your computer. Be ready to act the moment a good time opens up!

There are other tools out there that do the same thing, but they cost money :(

This script is built to check for availability once per minute and log the results to a Discord webhook. The reason for sending it to Discord was for push notification support!

1. Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/benrucker/sf-globalentry-watcher

2. Navigate to the repo

cd sf-globalentry-watcher

3. Install the dependencies

npm install

4. Make a new file called .env
5. Generate a Discord webhook URL
   1. Right click a text channel and click "Edit Channel"
   2. Go to "Integrations" -> "Webhooks" -> "New Webhook" -> "Copy Webhook URL"
6. Paste the URL in .env following WEBHOOK_URL= (with quotes around it)

WEBHOOK_URL="https://discord.com/api/webhooks/<CHANNEL ID>/<TOKEN>"

8. Testrun the application

npm run dev
# or
ts-node-esm src/index

9. The program should hit the API and send a message to the webhook with a time (like "Next slot: Wed Sep 13 2023 at 7:30 AM") or a notice that no times are available (like "No time slot available")

Instructions for automatically checking the status every minute.

1. Make a file called cron-runnable.sh with these contents:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
PATH=PASTE_PATH_HERE
npm run dev

2. Run echo $PATH, copy and paste the output to the second line of cron-runnable.sh
   • cron doesn't use your user's path when executing commands, despite using your user's permissions level
3. Run crontab -e
4. Enter something like this line:

* * * * *      cd /absolute/path/to/sf-globalentry-watcher && ./cron-runnable.sh > /tmp/ge-watcher.log 2>&1
# The asterisks mean "At every minute, run the command"
# You could instead change them to `0 * * * *` which would mean "On every hour, run the command"

5. Live monitor the script output with watch /tmp/ge-watcher.log

You don't have to use cron, of course - feel free to run this in a loop in your terminal. Just don't DoS the server; you know how fragile government websites can be!