rob_halifax

This is a simple application written using Rails 3 which will scrape the Halifax Online Banking and Northern Bank websites and return your account details and latest transactions in a JSON format. It uses a mobile user agent to keep loading times down (as they both finally have a mobile site).

It uses Mechanize and Nokogiri, both of which are fantastic.

Please, please, please don't be silly and put this online somewhere with your details without using an extra authentication layer.

Setup

I'm using this as a Heroku application, so I store the login details as environment variables. You can find out how to use them on Heroku over on the Heroku Help Center.

For local development, you can simply set the environment variables in your .bash_profile file:

export HALIFAX_USERNAME="myusername"
export HALIFAX_PASSWORD="mypassword"
export HALIFAX_SECRET="mylowercasesecret"

For simple authentication, I also check for a UUID environment variable. It can be comma seperated.

Then fire up the Rails server and it will give your a JSON response:

{
    "accounts": [
        {
            "figures": [
                {
                    "Balance": 5046.0
                },
                {
                    "Money available": 5024.3
                },
                {
                    "Overdraft": 50.0
                }
            ],
            "information": "11-88-99, 012345",
            "name": "Current Account",
            "transactions": [
                {
                    "balance": 5046.0,
                    "date": "2011-12-01",
                    "is_credit": false,
                    "name": "STUPID BANK FEES",
                    "value": -50.0
                },
                ...
            ]
        },
        {
            "figures": [
                {
                    "Available credit": 9100.0
                },
                {
                    "Credit limit": 9100.0
                }
            ],
            "information": "1234 5678 9101 1121",
            "name": "ONE CARD",
            "transactions": []
        }
    ],
    "success": true
}

Warning

I don't advice you to put this on a web server without adding another form of authentication on top of it.

Use this at your own risk. I will not be held responsible.