The project contains code to access the Trusted Travel Program website to notify you when an interview spot opens up at your local interview location.
The is NOT affliated with the United Stated Government or any of it's departments.
Clone this project onto your computer to get access to the code.
$ git clone https://github.com/tymiguel/global-entry-bot.git
We are not going to go into detail about environment set up, however, I ran this using python 3.5.6 and only needed to install twilio and dotenv. The rest of the packages are built-in so no need for additional work.
Create a free account on Twilio.
Twilio is a platform that will allow us to create a phone number that can be used to send SMS messages to a personal cell phone through Twilio's REST API. We will use this platform to alert us when a new global entry slot has opened up.
After creating an account, go through the process of creating a trial phone number for your account. They will give you credits that you can use to get started. Generally, this should be enough, but if you need more credits a few dollars will go along way.
Lastly, add the phone number that will be recieving the messages to the Verified Caller IDs list on your Twilio account. You will have to confirm that the number is allowed to recieve messages.
In the root directory of the project global-entry-bot/, create a .env file. This will store your Twilio credentials and the phone number you want to recieve the bot messages.
The file should contain FROM_NUMBER, TO_NUMBER, ACCOUNT_SID, and AUTH_TOKEN. See below for an example of the .env file structure.
FROM_NUMBER=<twilio phone number>
TO_NUMBER=<recieving phone>
ACCOUNT_SID=<twilio account id>
AUTH_TOKEN=<twilio auth token>
Note: Be sure to include the country code in your phone number. For example, the U.S. is "+1".
Go into the global_entry_bot.py file and replace the city variable with the city you want to search and the date_limit variable with the maximum date that you want to search out in advance.
The city must be the exact global entry location. This can be found on their website. For example, in Massachusetts, "East Boston" is the city location for the global entry offices at Boston's Logan Airport.
What I have done in the past is actually go onto the global entry site and book a date for an interview. Then, I use that date as my maximum date, with the thought that I will rebook any interview slot that is earlier than my current one.
Once you have done that we can finally test it out!
Open your terminal and cd into your global-entry-bot directoy and run the program from the shell using:
$ python -m global_entry_bot
You should see a response within seconds.
If there is no news, then it looks like we don't have any time slots available. However, if you did get a hit, go onto the global entry website and book that interview time!
This is great to run once, but we didn't create this to keep running this manually every few seconds. To have this run automatically, you need to create a cron job see example or something like that. You have a few options on where to run this job, but ultimately, it's up to you on how comfortable you feel and what makes the most sense to you.
More robust version:
- Find a remote computer that is always on, such as an AWS EC2 instance, and set up the code and cron job on that computer.
Simple verison:
- Use your computer, keep it on it's charger and don't let it go to sleep. Then, you can run the cron job on your computer.
Regardless of what you decide to do, I recommend creating a logs/ directory in the root global-entry-bot/ directory so that you can capture all the logs from the cron job. If there are errors, you will notice immediately.
I set mine up to run every 10 minutes, but you can adjust this to what you think is most appropriate.
Good luck!
I saw a few references out on the web that I used to build this. Shout out to the folks below for doing some of the early work to stand up these projects.