check_for_craiglist_deals

This is a script that will check craigslist URLS on an hourly basis and will notify on Discord when a new post is added.

It was developed on Python 3.12, but will likely work on most Python 3 versions.

You can find the github for this project here.

This project requires a .env file as well as a csv file in the configs directory.

Create a .env file in the root of the project. the .env file should look like this:

DISCORD_TOKEN=ASDFASDASDA123423DQWEQWEQWEQWE
CHANNELID=23424523456234234234

You can find guides online on how to create the discord bot and token and find the channel id.

In the configs directory, create a file called "craigslist_deals_to_check.csv"

It should look like this:

friendly_name,url
somegenericterm,https://craigslist.org/search/actualsearchurl(justcopyfrombrowser)

It's recommended to run this in a virtual environment (as always)

To install the prerequisites, run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

I deploy this in a docker container. Here's one way to do that:

docker build  --no-cache \
-t check_for_craiglist_deals /path/check_for_craiglist_deals"

This path has the Dockerfile, which contains:

FROM python:3

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y git
RUN python -m pip install --upgrade pip
# can use this if pip keeps using cached modules (it does)
RUN pip cache purge

RUN pip install httpx[http2] parsel nested_lookup
RUN pip install requests
RUN pip install beautifulsoup4
RUN pip install discord.py
RUN pip install colorlog
RUN pip install python-dotenv

WORKDIR /data/check_for_craiglist_deals
CMD [ "python", "check_for_craiglist_deals.py" ]

That allows me to deploy once and then subsequent deployments are just copies of the .py files to the data directory.

docker create --name=check_for_craiglist_deals \
-v /path/data:/data \
-v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
--restart=always check_for_craiglist_deals

docker start check_for_craiglist_deals

You can check if the container started succesfully with this command:

docker logs -f check_for_craiglist_deals

Alternatively you can also just run python check_for_craiglist_deals.py, assuming python is installed on your system.

This bot only notifies during certain hours, but this can't be configured currently (if there's interest, I might add that as a configurable option)

Currently this is set in the code, function load_deal_data_and_start_checking():

 if datetime.datetime.now().hour > 12 or datetime.datetime.now().hour < 2

You can always change the hours there to something you'd prefer.