Southwest Checkin automatically checks a passenger into their flights for a given confirmation number. The user will receive an email on successful check in. It contains both a command line interface (CLI) and a web interface. A live, usable version is hosted on Heroku:
Here are some of the features of the application:
- Checks the passenger in for all flights (departure and arrival) exactly 24 hours before the flight leaves
- Informs the user via email after successful check in and includes boarding position and boarding pass
- Checks in all passengers for that reservation
- Stores the information in a database in case the web interface or CLI is restarted
If southwest changes the checkin process, the parser might need to be updated. If you see a bug, file an issue or fork and create a pull request with the fix.
The easiest way to install the dependencies is with pip, a python package manager. It is also good practice to isolate your environment with a virtual environment. If you are unfamiliar with pip or virtualenv, I would recommend reading this.
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
You will also need a settings.py. You can create this by copying default_settings.py. By default, it will store the data in a SQlite database.
Enter a first and last name, confirmation number, and email. The system will attempt to locate your reservation and add it to the system for automatic checkin. You will receive an email when you add your reservation to the system and again on successful checkins for your flights. Under a normal round trip scenario, you will be checked in for departure and arrival.
To cancel the automatic checkin, simply search for the reservation and cancel it.
To run the development server on localhost:5000:
$ python server.py
Configuring the from email address and password in sw_checkin_email.py is required for the web interface.
You can kick off an automatic checkin with the following command. Run the script:
$ python sw_checkin_email.py John Doe ABC123
Storing the reservations in a database is optional (on by default). If an active reservation is contained in the database, you can resume the automatic checkin by running the following command. It will prompt to ask if you would like to resume any of the previously added reservations.
$ python sw_checkin_email.py
There are also several useful ways of running the script in the background.
Run the script in the background:
$ python sw_checkin_email.py John Doe ABC123 &
Run the script in the background and log to file:
$ python sw_checkin_email.py John Doe ABC123 > sw_checkin_email.log 2>&1 &
Run the script in the background, log to file, and allow yourself to logout (you cannot retake ownership of this command and must use kill to stop it)
$ nohup python sw_checkin_email.py John Doe ABC123 &> sw_checkin_email.log
For more expanation on these commands, you may want to read about nohup and disown.
- The application was written in Python
- Beautiful Soup 4 scrapes southwest.com
- The web interface was written using Flask
- The database layer was written using SQLAlchemy
- The live app is hosted on a Heroku free dyno and uses Heroku Postgres Dev to host the database and New Relic for app statistics