London Apartment Bot

This project is a command-line app containing a cron-job that will frequently crawl R**htMve* & *Z**pla to find new apartments for you and post them to Slack, given a specific set of search criteria.

NB: It can be somewhat temperamental since a lot of checks are in place to prevent crawlers on these websites. Changes will be inevitable.

Installation

1. Clone this repository
2. Select the correct node version (e.g. with nvm)
3. Install dependencies
4. Copy and populate the environment variables
5. Update the config files with your search parameters
6. Start the command-line app

$ git clone [email protected]:maxkramer/london-apartment-bot.git && cd london-apartment-bot
$ nvm use
$ npm install
$ mv .env.example .env
$ npm start

Running the app

In the background

There's a convenience Make task for this; simply run make to start it up.

Logs

In production mode, logs are written to $PWD/cron-job.log with pino. Simply tail this file.

In the foreground

$ npm start

Environment Variables

To run this project, you will need to populate the following environment variables in your .env file:

Name	Description	Default Value
SLACK_TOKEN	A Slack API user-token that you can get from: https://api.slack.com/authentication/token-types	undefined
SLACK_CHANNEL	The Channel (id) that you would like to post the apartments to	undefined
DATABASE_HOST	The host of the postgres instance e.g. localhost, IP address, fqdn	localhost
DATABASE_PORT	The port of the postgres instance (usually 5432)	5432
DATABASE_USERNAME	The username to login to the postgres instance with	postgres
DATABASE_PASSWORD	The password to login to the postgres instance with	password
DATABASE_NAME	The name of the database to store the listings in, that the user has access to	londonapartmentbot

Configuration

All configuration specific to the different adapters can be found in the relevant adapter file.

Enabling / Disabling Adapters

Simply set the enabled flag to true or false.

Modifying Search Parameters

The parameters that can be changed are:

• name: The name to show in Slack
• enabled: Whether the adapter is enabled or disabled
• maxPrice: The maximum price of listings to show
• minPrice: The minimum price of listings to show
• minBeds: The minimum number of beds in a listing to show
• furnished: Whether it should show only furnished apartments
• slackIcon: The icon to use for this adapter in Slack

Modifying the Slack Message

Simply change the relevant sections in this file.

License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License