Automating the Search for Covid-19 Vaccine Appointments at Walgreens
- 1 minWhy did I create this?
As a break from school and work, I decided to make a small project that I could learn about a new topic (web scraping) while creating, and also create something useful. As finding Covid-19 vaccination appointments has been very difficult due to high demand and limited supply, I decided to create a Python script that will notify me when an appointment becomes available in a list of zip codes that I specified.
How it works
Using the Python library Selenium, I learned how to interact with a webpage through Python code. The program I created simply iterates over a list of zip codes that I specify, and then types each one into the text box on Walgreens’s website. Then, it reads the pop-up that appears as either “Appointments available!” or “Appointments unavailable”. Once an appointment is found, I send a text message to my phone with a message that looks like this: 
Here is a quick demonstration of what it looks like when the program is running (running on zip codes near UW-Madison for testing purposes, but did not find any appointments during demonstration):
Read more at: GitHub Link
Drew Halverson
A college student studying computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.