A simple script which can alert a Mac OS user for available slots for COVID-19 vaccination through the CoWin api. Contains a callable script that can be setup as a cron job on Mac / Linux based systems to alert the user at any time. Can also be used in Windows with some changes.

• Python 3.x version installed on your macbook.
• newman installed through node package manager (npm)
• osascript utility installed (usually by default) on Mac

• Install python using homebrew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

brew install python

• Next, install npm (node package manager)

https://nodejs.org/en/download/

• Install the npm package newman, This package provides the ability to fetch availability status from CoWin :

sudo npm -g install newman

• Clone the repo on git:

git clone https://github.com/shaansharma1980/CoWin_slotter.git

chmod +x cowin_notifier.bash

./cowin_notifier.bash

The above command will show an alert as below:

crontab -e

Paste the line below at the end of the editor with a CTRL + V

30 * * * * /home/$USER/cowin_notifier.bash

Type :q! to exit the editor.

Thats it !

• newman is an npm package which provides postman type curl capabilities. It is used to get results from the CoWin api.
• cowin_notifier.py reads the dump of the vaccination data from a tmp file and formats it to call osascript utility.
• osascript is used to display the notification to the mac user (it is available by default on mac)

  • osascript -e 'display notification "Message" with title "Title"'

• This is free software and if anyone would like to extend it to help create further improvements, please feel free to do so !
• Please ensure that your sole purpose is to help the Indian people in getting vaccination slots across India.
• Do not overload the api with HTTP requests ! Be nice and let others use it judiciously, put a pragmatic time interval between fetches.