Amazon Price drop notification script

A Python application to monitor an Amazon.in product and send notification through telegram on price drop.

The application has two parts:

1. Monitor price
2. Send notification

Monitor price:

Requests and Beautifulsoup modules are used to scrape the page and get the product title and it's price. The product page is scrapped every 15 min.

Send notification:

Generate a price drop alert to user via Telegram API using python-telegram-bot module.

Installation

Install on Local machine

Install dependencies (debian/ubuntu):

sudo apt-get -y install python3-pip && \
sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt

The script was tested on Python 3.7.3.

Refer official telegram documentaion on How to create a new bot

Put the botToken generated from @botFather in config.json and run main.py.

python3 ./main.py

botToken: Token given by botFather when new bot is created.

Set-up on Heroku

Create an account on Heroku and install Heroku CLI

curl https://cli-assets.heroku.com/install.sh | sudo sh

Login into Heroku

sudo heroku login

Goto heroku website and create a new app. Note down the name of application when you create it. It will be used in below commands.

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/th3nyx/amazon-price-notify.git && \
cd amazon-price-notify && \
heroku git:remote -a YOUR-HEROKU-APPLICATION-NAME

Deploy your application and watch logs:

sudo git add . && \
sudo git commit -am "make it better" && \
sudo git push heroku master && \
heroku logs --tail

NOTE: Heroku free account kills the container after half an hour. Add your heroku application to UptimeRobot to keep it alive.

As of 2019-08-26: Heroku only allows 550hrs/month for free accounts without credit card verification.

Usage

Search for your bot on telegram and start conversation.

/start: Bot sends you an introduction
/add: Add your product
/alert: Create alert

Demo

Visit amazon-price-tracker-bot.herokuapp.com to spin up the heroku application if it's dead.
Search for testbot13371 on Telegram and start the conversation.

Note: The test bot should work if Amazon.in haven't changed their HTML tags

To-do

• Use classes and object to support multiple products later.
• Use Threads to track multiple items on watch.
• Enable user to provide link directly from telegram app.
• Accept all kinds to URL
• Type checking of input data.
• Heroku integration.
• Overwrite old product when new product is added
• Randomize User-Agent to avoid IP ban from Amazon.
• Add cooldown timer once notification is sent.
• Add snooze command to stop notifications for that many hours.
• Exception handeling.
• Introduce database to stop the links, so server restart or script crash won't affect the links.

Future Work:

• Create a telegram menu and inlineKeyboard to replace commands.
• Support for multiple products per customer.

Known-Issues

1. If price of product is below threshold for more than 15 min. There will be multiple notifications.
2. Incorrect URL hangs the application. (FIXED)