Logos of Python, Selenium, Slack, and GHA

Introduction

There’s a second-hand bookstore nearby, and I have a growing list of books I’d love to read. Since I’m not in a rush to get these titles, I wanted a way to be notified whenever any of them are in stock so I can drop by and pick them up.

However, the bookstore’s website doesn’t offer a notification feature where you can set a book and choose how to get alerted. Until now, I had to manually visit the site and search for each book on my list one by one. Boring.

So, I decided to build my own automated solution to save time and get notified instantly.

Solution

I am using Python, Selenium, Slack, and Github Actions for this.
The whole thing can be found in this repo: https://github.com/k-candidate/selenium-book-search-slack-alerts.

I will probably modify it down the road. Here’s the repo at this point in time: https://github.com/k-candidate/selenium-book-search-slack-alerts/blob/795ee8314aa8290721d1d03f4eb681fb6a190d2f/README.md.

There’s a readme, and the code is self-explanatory and annotated. So I will just put bullet points of what I did:

  • Make the repo, and clone it locally 
    git clone https://github.com/k-candidate/selenium-book-search-slack-alerts.git
codium selenium-book-search-slack-alerts
pyenv local 3.13.1
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install selenium
  • I need the Driver for Selenium. I am using Chromium, which I have installed via snap (sudo snap install chromium). It comes with the driver located at /snap/bin/chromium.chromedriver
  • While developing the script, I want to use Selenium in headed mode to be able to see the browser and interact with it. I left the option commented in the script to make future maintenance easier.
  • Slack
    • https://api.slack.com/apps
    • Click “Create New App” > “From Scratch” > Give it a name and choose the workspace > “Create App”
    • Go to “Oauth & Permissions” > “Bot Token Scopes” “Add an Oauth Scope” > “chat:write” > Click “Install to ${workspace name}” > “Allow” > Save the “Bot User Oauth Token” (xoxb-…)
    • Go to slack and create a new channel > In the channel, invite the bot using the slash command: /invite @AppName
    • What I have done so far would allow me to send messages using the Slack SDK, which I have used in the past. But I do not want to do that here. I will use webhooks as they’ll need less maintenance.
    • Click on “Incoming Webhooks” > Toggle to “On” > Click on “Reinstall your app” > choose the channel in the dropdown menu > “Allow”
    • Copy the Webhook URL and save it.
  • Test locally via 
    python main.py \
--book-list "Sherlock Holmes; The snows of Kilimanjaro; Dr. Seuss" \
--slack-webhook-url "https://hooks.slack.com/your/webhook" \
--website-url "https://my.local.bookstore"
  • Make the github action run daily.
  • Put all variables in GHA secrets (for privacy).

Conclusion

It’s doing what I want it to do. Here’s a screenshot of the final result which is the slack notification: Slack notification of books found