README.md

BayIMCO Appointment Checker

This is a quick and dirty bot, that checks every time it is called if there are any new available vaccination appointments available within the BayIMCO system for a given user.

Prerequisites

• If you haven't been invited yet by the system to select an appointment, this will not work.
• If you haven't confirmed your phone number after having been invited to select an appointment, this will not work.
• python3.something

Important Notice

The /api/v1/citizens/{userUUID}/appointments/next-endpoint is heavily ratelimited (about 30 requests/15 minutes). After hitting the limit, it will only return 404 and behave like if there are no appointments available.

Also: Be aware that the powers that be™ do not appreciate services like https://impformation.bayern/ and might send the LKA to your door, claiming your script might be causing 10% and more of the daily server load... Proceed at your own risk. But do let me know if that happens to you - I'd love to share a good laugh with you.

You might also want to use the newer toolkit available at https://github.com/pc-coholic/impformation.bayern/ as it implements the login-sequence and avoids running into issues with expired refresh_tokens.

Installation

• mkdir c19ac
• cd c19ac
• git clone https://github.com/pc-coholic/c19ac.git
• python3 -m venv venv
• source venv/bin/activate
• pip install -r c19ac/requirements.txt

Configuration

• Rename the config.json.dist-file to config.json and adjust to your desired settings
  • The userid is your BayIMCO UUID and can be taken from the URL (e.g. for https://impfzentren.bayern/citizen/overview/34622806-40C1-4FDF-8F36-D6C4DCD6564E use 34622806-40C1-4FDF-8F36-D6C4DCD6564E).
  • The mail...-settings should be self-explanatory.
  • The starttoken needs to be taken from BayIMCO after the login. Open your browser's Devtools and look for a call to https://ciam.impfzentren.bayern/auth/realms/C19V-Citizen/protocol/openid-connect/token. Copy and paste the value of the refresh_token.
  • recipient is the mail-address that will receive the notifications.
  • Using stop_on_success, you can decide if the bot should keep working, even after an appointment has been found.
  • stop_on_fail will not let the bot run, if the query for appointments fails.
  • stop_on_tokenfail controls if the bot will keep trying to get data, if refreshing the Authorization token fails.
  • sys_stop is the setting that will be set by the script, if any of the above three settings have triggered a stop. To reset, set this back to false.
• cd into the script's directory, run it, and check the output.
• Setup a cronjob to run the script at your desired intervals. Every 5 Minutes should be plenty:
  • */5 * * * * cd /home/user/c19ac/c19ac; /home/user/c19ac/venv/bin/python3 check.py >> /home/user/c19ac/c19ac.log 2>&1

Things to keep in mind

The following information is accurate as of 02.04.2021/BayIMCO v6.19.1:

• The appointment-selection page (https://impfzentren.bayern/citizen/appointment-selection/<UUID>) will display by default that there are no appointments available. This is not always true:
  • When accessing the page, a XHR-call is made to https://impfzentren.bayern/api/v1/citizens/<UUID>/appointments/next
  • This call is supposed to return almost instantly - but it does not always do so.
  • If no appointments could be found, the call returns 404 and the message is correct.
  • During high load times (e.g.: New appointments have been added), the call might timeout with an error 500.
  • In this case, the message will still be displayed - even though there might be appointments available.
  • Actually, an error 500 is a good indication that there are indeed appointments available - the 404 is the one, that returns instantly.
• When calling upon https://impfzentren.bayern/api/v1/citizens/<UUID>/appointments/next, the system will not only display the appointment to your (or expose it to the system) - it will also reserve it for your user for 10 minutes.
  • The reservation expiration can be seen on the email you will be sent: expiresAt.
  • The message also contains the date and time for your first and second vaccination, the location of the vaccination site (you might be eligible to access more than one site) and the type of vaccine that you will receive.
• While the call to https://impfzentren.bayern/api/v1/citizens/<UUID>/appointments/next produces a 10 minute reservation for that specific appointment for you in the backend, it is not known at this point, if that exact reservation will be proposed to you when accessing BayIMCO through the webinterface.
• If you access your appointment selection page (bookmark https://impfzentren.bayern/citizen/appointment-selection/<UUID> for faster access), open your browser's devtools network tab and keep an eye on the calls to https://impfzentren.bayern/api/v1/citizens/<UUID>/appointments/next. There is absolutely no need to franatically refresh the page, as long as they have not timed out. This will generally take about 2 minutes.
• If you access the appointment selection page after having received the email from this script and having refreshed the page ever so often after the XHR-requests have timed out: Don't despair! If you don't log in and out of the system, there is a good chance that you actually got an appointment reserved for you and that once the system load has reduced you will be able to see it on the selection page.
• If the script sees an available appointment (which probably results in a reservation of that appointment for your user for 10 minutes), this script will not confirm it for you! You will have to manually click the appointment confirmation button in the BayIMCO-webinterface yourself!
• If you just want to play around with this script, please consider using the UAT-system instead of the production one: https://uat.impfzentren.bayern/

Further research

This script has been hacked together in about 30 minutes with no regard to style and functionality. There are probably a lot of areas for improvement. Feel free to submit a PR!

List of vaccines

ID	Type
001	COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca®
002	Comirnaty (BioN-Tech/Pfizer)
003	Moderna COVID19 Vaccine
004	SP/GSK
005	J&J/Jansen
006	Novavax
007	Curevac