clalit-appt-checker

Python scraper to check for earlier appointments in Clalit Health Services

Some background

If you ever needed to schedule a doctor's appointment at Clalit you probably noticed that most available slots are a few months ah ead, and it's not that easy to find a slot for "next week" (sometimes not even two weeks from now). There is a "waiting list", but it's based on someone from Clalit calling you to re-schedule your appointment (and it usually doesn't really work). Sometimes people cancel their appointments, but in order to catch a better slot - you need to sign in to the website and look for a newer slot. Over and over again.

So basically this is what this script does for me.

It will not change your appointment, but will let you know (by mail) that there is a newer slot available.

How to run

1. Make sure you have pipenv installed
2. Run pipenv install to install all python dependencies
3. Copy the sample env file and set the relevant values inside cp .env.example .env
4. Run pipenv run checker to execute the checker script

Set as cronjob

*/15 * * * * cd /PATH/TO/clalit-appt-checker && /usr/local/bin/pipenv run checker >/tmp/cronstdout.log 2>/tmp/cronstderr.log
This will run the script on every 15th minute of the hour (00:00, 00:15, 00:30, 00:45, 01:00 ...)

Send mails using gmail

In order to send emails using SMTP with gmail you will need to configure your gmail account to allow less secure apps amd setup an App password