availability-bot

Built to kill the repetitive chore of manually updating a company availability portal. Every weekday morning, this GitHub Action spins up Playwright, logs into the Drupal site, toggles your status for the next day, and texts you a Telegram receipt. Zero friction, zero forgotten updates

How It Works

GitHub Actions (scheduled daily)
  └─→ Playwright logs into company Drupal site
        └─→ Navigates to /change-availability-for-tomorrow/{status}
              └─→ Verifies success message in page
                    └─→ Sends confirmation to Telegram

The workflow runs Mon-Fri at 11:00 UTC (7:00 AM ET). It can also be triggered manually from the Actions tab.

Setup

1. Create a Telegram Bot

1. In Telegram, message @BotFather and send /newbot.
2. Give it a name (e.g. Availability Bot) and a username (e.g. YourNameAvailabilityBot).
3. BotFather will give you a token — save it. It looks like 123456:ABC-DEF1234ghikl...
4. Start a chat with your new bot (search its username, tap Start).
5. To get your Chat ID, message your bot anything, then visit:

   https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_TOKEN>/getUpdates
   

6. Look for "chat":{"id":123456789} — that number is your Chat ID.

2. Set GitHub Secrets

Navigate to Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret and add:

Secret	Description
BASE_URL	Full base URL of the company site, e.g. https://www.example.com
USERNAME	Your login email or username
PASSWORD	Your password
STATUS_CHOICE	available or unavailable (case-insensitive)
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN	Token from BotFather
TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID	Your Telegram chat ID from getUpdates

Optional:

Secret	Default	Description
PAGE_TIMEOUT	30000	Page load / selector wait timeout in milliseconds
MAX_RETRIES	3	Number of retry attempts on failure
RETRY_DELAY	10	Seconds to wait between retries

3. Test

Go to the Actions tab → Set Daily Availability → Run workflow. Check the run logs. If it fails, screenshots are uploaded as artifacts to help debug.

4. Adjust the Schedule

Edit the cron expression in .github/workflows/availability.yml under schedule. The current value 0 11 * * 1-5 = Mon-Fri at 11:00 UTC.

Timezone	UTC Offset	Cron for ~7 AM
Eastern (ET)	UTC-5 / UTC-4	0 11 * * 1-5 (7 AM / 6 AM)
Pacific (PT)	UTC-8 / UTC-7	0 14 * * 1-5 (6 AM / 7 AM)
Central Europe (CET)	UTC+1 / UTC+2	0 5 * * 1-5 (6 AM / 7 AM)

Local Testing

You can test the script on your machine before pushing to GitHub.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12+
• A Telegram bot and chat ID (same as CI setup)

Setup

# Clone and enter the repo
git clone https://github.com/xjayk/availability-bot.git
cd availability-bot

# Create a virtual environment
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
playwright install chromium --with-deps

Run

# Set required environment variables
export BASE_URL="https://www.example.com"
export USERNAME="your-email@company.com"
export PASSWORD="your-password"
export STATUS_CHOICE="available"       # or "unavailable"

# Optional overrides
export PAGE_TIMEOUT="30000"            # milliseconds
export MAX_RETRIES="1"                 # 1 = no retry (faster for testing)
export RETRY_DELAY="5"                 # seconds between retries

# Run the script
python set_availability.py

Check Results

After running, two screenshots are saved in the current directory:

File	Contents
final-status.png	The profile page after toggling availability
error-screenshot.png	Only created if something failed

If you also want Telegram notifications locally, set TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN and TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID and run the full workflow with act:

act workflow_dispatch -s BASE_URL="$BASE_URL" -s USERNAME="$USERNAME" ...

Testing the Toggle Without Changing Status

To verify the script works without actually changing your availability, set STATUS_CHOICE to your current status. The toggle is idempotent — setting "available" when you're already available is a no-op but still returns the same success message.

How the Status Toggle Works

The script uses a URL-based toggle discovered by inspecting the company Drupal site:

• /change-availability-for-tomorrow/available → marks you available for tomorrow
• /change-availability-for-tomorrow/unavailable → marks you unavailable for tomorrow

No form submission or modal interaction is needed — just navigating to the URL (while authenticated) changes the status. The script verifies by checking for the success message ("You're made available for tomorrow") or the updated header CSS class.

Project Structure

.github/workflows/availability.yml   — Scheduled availability setter
.github/workflows/ci.yml              — Linting and type checking on push/PR
set_availability.py                   — Playwright automation script
requirements.txt                      — Python dependencies
pyproject.toml                        — Ruff + mypy configuration

CI

On every push and pull request to main, the CI workflow runs:

Job	Tool	What It Checks
Lint Python	Ruff	Syntax errors, unused imports, code style violations
Format Python	Ruff	Consistent formatting (double quotes, spacing)
Type Check	Mypy	Type errors in set_availability.py
Lint YAML	yamllint	Valid workflow syntax, indentation errors

The daily availability workflow runs independently of CI, but a future improvement will gate it on the last CI pass and send a Telegram message with the gate status.