Letscamp

I built a bot that scrapes recreation.gov for campsite available for dates I've input. When it finds a campsite availability, it texts me so that I can hop online to book it. This project is 50% a pet project to play around with Python and related tech and 50% "hey, this is actually kinda useful".

This project started as a fork of bri-bri/yosemite-camping running on a VPS with a cron job, but over the years has evolved into a more robust application that allows me to:

  • add campsites outside of Yosemite
  • add desired reservations via a CLI
  • use recreation.gov's new RIDB API (the old one is no longer supported), using an OpenAPI-generated Python client
  • use built-in scheduling

Future improvements include:

  • automatically booking a reservation when a campsite becomes available
  • better scaling— separating the config management, the scraper, and the notification system
  • Dockerizing it
  • better handling around rate limiting for the RIDB API

Source code available upon request. Built using Python, Selenium, SQLite, and Twilio.