What is this?

Megabus is a bus line that offers really cheap tickets. Finding these "cheap" tickets however is really cumbersome and tedious on their website.

This project aims to solve this problem by wrapping megabus's internal API.

This is for educational purposes.

2020 Update: I made this in 2017 when I was a broke college freshmen, so it might not work now.

Web App

Here is a web app I really quickly hacked together with React: https://megabus-ticket-finder.herokuapp.com/

Just for fun, it uses socket.io so the frontend gets updated real time when the backend finds each new ticket. It is pretty buggy, but I put it in there to demonstrate how easy it would be to add a feature like that.

How to Use

If you would like to use this with Node, you can!

Download this project. The lib folder has what you need. I have all my tickets cache into a Firebase database. You can either ignore this or connect to your own database. (Look at firebase/secretkey.js, dotenv, and config.js)

const TicketFinder = require("./lib").TicketFinder;
const Route = require("./lib").Route;

let finder = new TicketFinder({
	start: "TODAY",
	// start: "2017-11-17",
	latestAvailable: true,
	// end: "2017-12-20",
	// weekends: true,
	// totalPassengers: 2
	days: [4,5,6]
}, [ new Route("PSU", "Pittsburgh") ]);

This will create a TicketFinder object. The second parameter is the date options, and has documentation you can find here. The second parameter can be a list of new Routes.

finder.getTicketsInPriceRange(0, 10)
	.then(function(payload) {
		payload.tickets.forEach(function(ticket) {
			console.log(ticket.toString());
		});
	})

Heres what this will produce

Features

• Search Megabus tickets to save money
• Set up email alerts triggered by price
• Track price history of tickets

The email alerting system actually does work. I turned it off on the Heroku server, but if you clone the repository you can see how it would work.

There is some documentation on the design of the database and some logic behind some of the complicated mechanisms of the project here.

I wrote a Medium article when I first started this project if you are interested here.

I also got 50 Megabus tickets for free by using this program. Read more here.