Notify Me

Python Bot to notify when you can place order on Instacart -- More details on my blog Raju's Guide

Ingredients

Postman, Python, Twilio and Mailgun

How to Use this Program

Run this program periodically as a crob job. It will check and notify you via email or text if any local stores listed on Instacart (such as Costco, Safeway, Kroger, Bharat Bazar, CVS) have delivery time windows available so that you can submit orders.

• Provides ability to monitor multiple stores available on Instacart
• You have option to get notification via email or text or both
• Able to notify multiple addresses once per delivery window availability

Email Notifications

You will need a Mailgun domain to enable notifcation emails.

Text Notifications

Twilio account will be needed.

For both of these services (Mailgun & Twilio), I'm replying on basic tier plan which is free and good enough for our minimum needs.

Setup

• We will be using Python 3 (requires 3.6 or above). It's recommended you use Python Virtual Environment along with Pyenv
• Install all needed libraries pip install -r requirements.txt
• Configuration
  • Copy example.env as .env file into your home directory.
  • Update each parameter with correct values for your setup. To Find out your Session Cookie info, use Postman App along with Cookies Interceptor for Chrome
  • Update stores parameter with store names available in your local area. This may be case sensitivie, not sure.
  • example.env is prepopulated store list with costco and cvs store. INSTACART_STORE_LIST=costco,cvs
  • MY_ZIP, _ID, AND _LOC_ID are optional parameters if you want to explicitely specify which location of a store to check (will otherwise default to last one viewed with the cookie session). You can find these IDs by clicking in your browser to select the store location then viewing the BODY of the PUT to /v3/bundle.
  • TODO: Allow for multiple location IDs for the same store ID
  • TODO: Future plan is get list of all stores available in your local area using zip code and only provide those as options.

Running the program

# Get Help to know more about all available options (--store and --method are mandatory. select from available options as mentioned in .env)
python instacart-delivery-time-alert.py --help

# Simple Command line execution
python instacart-delivery-time-alert.py

# Command line execution with email and text notification
python instacart-delivery-time-alert.py --email --text --store costco --method delivery

# Cron job to run every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/python /Users/rkadam/work/pyfun/notify-me/instacart-delivery-time-alert.py --email --text --store total-wine-more --method delivery 2>&1 >> /Users/rkadam/work/pyfun/instacart-run.log.total-wine-more
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/python /Users/rkadam/work/pyfun/notify-me/instacart-delivery-time-alert.py --email --text --store costco --method pickup 2>&1 >> /Users/rkadam/work/pyfun/instacart-run.log.costco

Limitation

• You will need to delete lock file for given store (example notification-instacart.lock.costco located in user home directory) if you want to get notification again for your next order. You could do this manually or schedule a cron job to attempt to delete the lock file if present at an interval of your choosing.