CS2 Update Notifier

An automated, serverless application that monitors the Counter-Strike 2 update feed and sends a formatted email notification whenever Valve releases a patch.

How It Works

The full pipeline runs on a schedule every 30 minutes:

1. Trigger — AWS EventBridge fires the Lambda function on a cron schedule.
2. Fetch — The function fetches the CS2 RSS feed (XML) using Python's urllib and parses it with xml.etree.ElementTree to extract the latest update's title, date, GUID, and raw HTML description.
3. Dedup check — The GUID of the latest update is compared against the last-seen GUID stored in a DynamoDB table (CS2-update-tracker). If they match, execution stops — no duplicate emails.
4. Parse — If the update is new, a custom HTMLParser subclass (UpdateParser) converts the raw HTML patch notes into clean, readable plain text, turning <li> elements into bullet points and preserving section headers.
5. Email — The formatted patch notes are sent as a plain-text email via AWS SES with the subject line CS2 Update - <date>.
6. Save — The new GUID is written back to DynamoDB so future runs know this update has already been processed.

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Runtime	Python 3.12
Compute	AWS Lambda
Scheduler	AWS EventBridge (every 30 minutes)
State	AWS DynamoDB
Email	AWS SES
Feed source	XML RSS via urllib + xml.etree.ElementTree
HTML parsing	Custom HTMLParser subclass

Local Setup

Prerequisites: Python 3.12, pip, AWS credentials configured locally (for DynamoDB and SES access)

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/TrevorMcCormack/CS2-Update-Notifier.git
cd "CS2-Update-Notifier"

2. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Create a .env file in the project root:

EMAIL_ADDRESS=your_email@gmail.com

4. Run locally

python main.py

The script will check the RSS feed, compare against DynamoDB, and send an email if a new update is found.

Project Status

Fully deployed and running. The Lambda function is live on AWS, triggered automatically by EventBridge every 30 minutes. DynamoDB persists state between invocations to guarantee exactly-once delivery per update.