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RestockBot

Year 2020 has been quite hard for hardware supply. Graphics cards are out of stock everywhere. Nobody can grab the new generation (AMD RX 6000 series, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 series). Even older generations are hard to find. RestockBot is a bot that crawl retailers websites and notify when a product is available.

Requirements

Headless browser

Use Docker:

docker run --name chromium --rm -d -p 9222:9222 montferret/chromium

Or get inspired by the source code to run it on your own.

Amazon (optional)

To access the Product Advertising API and start to notify for Amazon products, you will need to have a valid Amazon Associates account in the Marketplace of your choice. You will then be able to retreive your partner tag, and the Marketplace name obviously.

Once your account has been validated, you can request access to the Product Advertising API (PA API) to retreive your access key and your secret key.

Ensure you follow the terms of services before subscribing to the Amazon Associates program and use the PA API.

Twitter (optional)

Follow this procedure to generate all the required settings:

• consumer_key
• consumer_secret
• access_token
• access_token_secret

Telegram (optional)

Follow this procedure to create a bot token.

Then you have two possible destinations to send messages:

• channel using a channel_name (string)
• chat using a chat_id (integer)

For testing purpose, you should store the token in a variable for next sections:

read -s TOKEN

Chat

To get the chat identifier, you can send a message to your bot then read messages using the API:

curl -s -XGET "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TOKEN}/getUpdates" | jq -r ".result[].message.chat.id"

You can test to send messages to a chat with:

read CHAT_ID
curl -s -XGET "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TOKEN}/sendMessage?chat_id=${CHAT_ID}&text=hello" | jq

Channel

Public channel names can be used (example: @mychannel). For private channels, you should use a chat_id instead.

You can test to send messages to a channel with:

read CHANNEL_NAME
curl -s -XGET "https://api.telegram.org/bot${TOKEN}/sendMessage?chat_id=${CHANNEL_NAME}&text=hello" | jq

Don't forget to prefix the channel name with an @.

Database

SQLite (default)

Default database driver is SQLite using the restockbot.db file.

PostgreSQL

To configure a PostgreSQL database, you can use Docker:

cp -p docker/postgresql.env.example docker/postgresql.env
docker-compose -f docker-compose-postgresql.yml up -d

Then see the configuration section to define the database configuration.

MySQL

To configure a MySQL database, you can use Docker:

cp -p docker/mysql.env.example docker/mysql.env
docker-compose -f docker-compose-mysql.yml up -d

Then see the configuration section to define the database configuration.

Compilation

With pre-built binaries

Download the latest release.

Ensure checksums are identical.

With make

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/jouir/restockbot.git

Build the restockbot binary:

make build
ls -l bin/restockbot

Build with the architecture in the binary name:

make release

Eventually remove produced binaries with:

make clean

With Docker

docker image build -t restockbot:$(cat VERSION) .

Configuration

Default file is restockbot.json in the current directory. The file name can be passed with the -config argument.

Options:

• database (optional)
  • type: driver to use (sqlite, postgres, mysql)
  • dsn: data source name (see documentation)
• urls (optional): list of retailers web pages
• amazon (optional)
  • searches: list of keywords to search for (ex: ["nvidia rtx", "amd rx"])
  • access_key: access key to access the Product Advertising API
  • secret_key: secret key to access the Product Advertising API
  • marketplaces: list of documents containing a Marketplace name and a partner_tag (ex: {"marketplaces":[{"name": "www.amazon.com", "partner_tag": "mytag-01"}]})
  • amazon_fulfilled: include only products packaged by Amazon
  • amazon_merchant: include only products sold by Amazon
  • affiliate_links: generate affiliate links with the partner tag
• nvidia_fe (optional)
  • locations: list of NVIDIA stores (ex ["es", "fr", "it"])
  • gpus: list of models (ex: ["RTX 3060 Ti", "RTX 3070"])
  • user_agent: user agent to simulate a real web browser (ex: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0)
  • timeout: maximum time before closing the request (optional)
• twitter (optional):
  • consumer_key: API key of your Twitter application
  • consumer_secret: API secret of your Twitter application
  • access_token: authentication token generated for your Twitter account
  • access_token_secret: authentication token secret generated for your Twitter account
  • hashtags: list of key/value used to append hashtags to each tweet. Key is the pattern to match in the product name, value is the string to append to the tweet. For example, {"twitter": {"hashtags": [{"rtx 3090": "#nvidia #rtx3090"}]}} will detect rtx 3090 to append #nvidia #rtx3090 at the end of the tweet.
  • enable_replies: reply to original message when product is not available anymore
  • retention: number of days to keep tweet references in the database (not deleted by default)
• telegram (optional):
  • channel_name: send message to a channel (ex: @channel)
  • chat_id: send message to a chat (ex: 1234)
  • token: key returned by BotFather
  • enable_replies: reply to original message when product is not available anymore
• include_regex (optional): include products with a name matching this regexp
• exclude_regex (optional): exclude products with a name matching this regexp
• price_ranges (optional): define price ranges for products based on the model. List of rules containing model (regex to apply to the product name, string), min (minimum expected price, float), max (maximum expected price, float), currency (price currency used by the filter, string). For example {"price_ranges":[{"model": "3090", "min": 0, "max": 3000, "currency": "EUR"}]}
• browser_address (optional): set headless browser address (ex: http://127.0.0.1:9222)
• api (optional):
  • address: listen address for the REST API (ex: 127.0.0.1:8000)
  • cert_file (optional): use SSL and use this certificate file
  • key_file (optional): use SSL and use this key file

Usage

With binary

restockbot -help

With Docker

docker run -it --name restockbot --rm --link chromium:chromium -v $(pwd):/root/ restockbot:$(cat VERSION) restockbot -help

Execution modes

There are two modes:

• default: without special argument, the bot parses websites and manage its own database
• API: using the -api argument, the bot starts the HTTP API to expose data from the database
• monitor: using the -monitor (optionaly with -monitor-warning-timeout and -monitor-critical-timeout arguments), the bot checks for last execution times per shop to return a Nagios compatible output

How to contribute

Lint the code with pre-commit:

docker run -it -v $(pwd):/mnt/ --rm golang:latest bash
go get -u golang.org/x/lint/golint
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y git python3-pip
pip3 install pre-commit
cd /mnt
pre-commit run --all-files

How to parse a shop

Create the Ferret query

RestockBot uses Ferret and its FQL (Ferret Query Language) to parse websites. The full documentation is available here. Once installed, this library can be used as a CLI command or embedded in the application. To create the query, we can use the CLI for fast iterations, then we'll integrate the query in RestockBot later.

vim shop.fql
ferret --cdp http://127.0.0.1:9222 -time shop.fql

The query must return a list of products in JSON format with the following elements:

• name: string
• url: string
• price: float
• price_currency: string
• available: boolean

Example:

[
  {
    "available": false,
    "name": "Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 AMP Holo",
    "price": 799.99,
    "price_currency": "EUR",
    "url": "https://www.topachat.com/pages/detail2_cat_est_micro_puis_rubrique_est_wgfx_pcie_puis_ref_est_in20007322.html"
  },
  {
    "available": false,
    "name": "Asus GeForce RTX 3070 DUAL 8G",
    "price": 739.99,
    "price_currency": "EUR",
    "url": "https://www.topachat.com/pages/detail2_cat_est_micro_puis_rubrique_est_wgfx_pcie_puis_ref_est_in20005540.html"
  },
  {
    "available": false,
    "name": "Palit GeForce RTX 3070 GamingPro OC",
    "price": 819.99,
    "price_currency": "EUR",
    "url": "https://www.topachat.com/pages/detail2_cat_est_micro_puis_rubrique_est_wgfx_pcie_puis_ref_est_in20005819.html"
  }
]

RestockBot will convert this JSON to a list of Product.

Embed the query

Shops are configured as a list of URLs:

{
    "urls": [
        "https://www.topachat.com/pages/produits_cat_est_micro_puis_rubrique_est_wgfx_pcie_puis_f_est_58-11447,11445,11446,11559,11558.html",
        "https://www.ldlc.com/informatique/pieces-informatique/carte-graphique-interne/c4684/+fv121-19183,19184,19185,19339,19340.html",
        "https://www.materiel.net/carte-graphique/l426/+fv121-19183,19184,19185,19339,19340/"
    ]
}

The Parse function (parser.go) will be called. In this example, the following shop names will be deduced: topachat.com, ldlc.com and materiel.net.

Each shop should implement a function to create a ferret query based on an URL:

• func createQueryForLDLC(url string) string
• func createQueryForMaterielNet(url string) string
• func createQueryForTopachat(url string) string
• ...

This function should be added to the switch of the createQuery function (parser.go).

Products will then be parsed.

Disclaimer

Crawling a website should be used with caution. Please check with retailers if the bot respects the terms of use for their websites. Authors of the bot are not responsible of the bot usage.