Buying a bicycle using Playwright

This year I decided I wanted a new bicycle. I still love my Giant Contend but decided to switch to Canyon Grizl. Sadly, buying it wasn't that easy. On the other hand, I was just after JS World and wanted to try some stuff out. Good news - I did it thanks to e2e testing, GitHub Action, and a Telegram bot.

The problem

The problem was simple - availability. There is only a limited time frame to preorder those bikes. First, I just signed up for their official newsletter - it should ping me when the bicycle is in stock. Luckily a friend at the bike store warned me that it may not work and it will better to check it manually every day at 6AM.

I hate waking at 6AM, and I love automating stuff, which leads to...

The solution

e2e testing

Checking availability was relatively easy. I had to go to a specific URL and see if one button had a particular class.

As I mentioned, I just came back from the JS World. Debbie O'Brien showed how amazing Playwright is, so I tried it. In the end, the real test looked like this:

import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';

test('Is bike available?', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto( process.env.URL );

  const bike = await page.locator('[data-product-size="'+ process.env.SIZE +'"]');
  await expect(bike).toHaveClass(/js-nonSelectableVariation/);
});

The URL and SIZE were stored in the .env file. Simple, right?

Executing this every hour

I usually would use Buddy for this, but I tried GitHub Actions.

name: Playwright Tests
on: 
  schedule:
    - cron: "*/60 * * * *"
jobs:
  test:
    timeout-minutes: 60
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: 18
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: Install Playwright Browsers
        run: npx playwright install chromium
      - name: Run Playwright tests
        run: npx playwright test
      - name: send telegram message on push
        uses: appleboy/telegram-action@master
        if: failure()
        with:
          to: $
          token: $
          message: |
           BUY YOUR BIKE NOW

The moment when the class was gone, I would get a notification on Telegram. And that is what happened on the 27th of February at 15:06 :) 5 minutes later, the bike was mine.

What's interesting - I never got the official notification, and all the bikes were gone later that day.

The moral

Logical thinking and problem-solving can be crucial in many situations. I used a more developer approach but could do this without code tools. There is a bigger chance that I would have to pay something for them.

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