it's a silly little script that searches craigslist for things that you want and then emails you
it's slow, it stores your email password in plaintext (make a burner email!), and it sometimes gets rate limited, but it works! I could make it faster, but a temporary fix is a permanent solution and who needs async requests and 2FA? Not me!
setup the venv
virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
install the craigslist library
pip install python-craigslist
pick an email. currently it's hard-coded to use gmail because I thought one day I might use their 2fa and avoid hard-coding a password. anyway, once the burner email is set up, you will need to allow less secure apps to access it before you can have python send emails from it. once that is done, stick the burner email info in config.yaml and whatever email you want to receive the notifications at in queries.yaml (beware, the emails usually go to spam at first, something about bare html, craigslist links, and weirdly named email accounts must be suspicious, who knew??)
following setup, you can configure your query in queries.yaml. there are some examples there, if you want to know more about choosing a site, category, and filters you can look at the python-craigslist documentation. then just run it:
python cl_scraper.py
it'll store any posts it finds in notified_posts.yaml and email you if it finds new ones.
to make it a cron job, do crontab -e and paste this after your cron timings:
cd <absolute_path_to_cl_scraper_dir> && venv/bin/python cl_scraper.py && cd -
I would recommend calling this no more frequently than every 15 minutes, otherwise craigslist gets upset with you