Campsite Availability Scraping

Thanks to https://github.com/bri-bri/yosemite-camping for getting me most of the way there.

This script scrapes the https://recreation.gov website for campsite availabilities.

Example Usage

$ python camping.py --start-date 2018-07-20 --end-date 2018-07-23 70926 70928 70925 71532
❌ TUOLUMNE MEADOWS, CA: 0 site(s) available out of 148 site(s)
🏕 LOWER PINES, CA: 11 site(s) available out of 73 site(s)
❌ UPPER PINES, CA: 0 site(s) available out of 235 site(s)
❌ BASIN MONTANA CAMPGROUND, MT: 0 site(s) available out of 30 site(s)

You can also read from stdin. Define a file (e.g. parks.txt) with IDs like this:

70926
70928
70925
71532

and then use it like this:

$ python camping.py --start-date 2018-07-20 --end-date 2018-07-23 --stdin < parks.txt

You'll want to put this script into a 5 minute crontab. You could also grep the output for the success emoji (🏕) and then do something in response, like notify you that there is a campsite available. See the "Twitter Notification" section below.

Getting park IDs

What you'll want to do is go to https://recreation.gov/unifSearchResults.do and search for the campground you want. Click on it in the search sidebar. Once it comes up it should take you to a page with campgroundDetails.do or campsiteSearch.do in the URL.

campgroundDetails.do

You should be able to see the parkId in the URL. Example:

https://www.recreation.gov/camping/tuolumne-meadows/r/campgroundDetails.do?contractCode=NRSO&parkId=70926

You can see the park ID right at the end there.

campsiteSearch.do

Open your browser's dev tools and go to the network tab. Refresh the page and look for the POST request to campsiteSearch.do. Open the params tab for the request and you'll see the parkId there.

Installation

I wrote this in Python 3.7 but I've tested it as working with 3.5 and 3.6 also.

python3 -m venv myvenv
source myvenv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
# You're good to go!

Development

This code is formatted using black and isort:

black -l 80 --py36 camping.py
isort camping.py

Feel free to submit pull requests, or look at the original: https://github.com/bri-bri/yosemite-camping

Differences from the original

• Python 3 🐍🐍🐍.
• Park IDs not hardcoded, passed via the CLI instead.
• Doesn't give you URLs for campsites with availabilities.
• Works with any park out of the box, not just those in Yosemite like with the original.

Twitter Notification

If you want to be notified about campsite availabilities via Twitter (they're the only API out there that is actually easy to use), you can do this:

1. Make an app via Twitter. It's pretty easy, go to: https://apps.twitter.com/app/new.
2. Change the values in twitter_credentials.py to match your key values.
3. Pipe the output of your command into notifier.py. See below for an example.

python camping.py --start-date 2018-07-20 --end-date 2018-07-23 70926 70928 | python notifier.py @banool1

You'll want to make the app on another account (like a bot account), not your own, so you get notified when the tweet goes out.

I left my API keys in here but don't exploit them ty thanks.