book-better

Serverless bot to book activities on Better UK. Powered by AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge Scheduler.

Currently only supports booking via benefits (e.g. the discontinued Better Racquets membership which allows you to book one court per day for free), but the code can be easily extended to also support booking via credits.

Pre-requisites

• Terraform (tested on v.1.9.5)
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Free Tier account with CLI v2 installed.
• Better UK with an appropriate membership type (e.g. Better Racquets).
• Poetry (tested on v1.7.1)

Installation

1. git clone this project.

2. cd into <path-to-project>/book-better/terraform.

3. Run cp terraform.tfvars.example terraform.tfvars to create a copy of a variable definition file.

4. Open terraform.tfvars using your favourite text editor, and modify the configuration as required. Configuration for more information. In general, you should only need to modify the following variables:

   • better_venue_slug
   • better_activity_slug
   • better_activity_start_time
   • better_activity_end_time
   • better_username
   • better_password

5. Run terraform init to install all necessary Terraform providers.

6. Run terraform apply -var-file='terraform.tfvars', and follow the prompts as instructed.

7. Verify your installation by running aws lambda invoke --function-name=$(terraform output -raw lambda_name) response.json and inspect response.json using your favourite text editor. You should see something like

   {"status": "error", "message": "Could not find any available slot on 2024-09-30."}
   

Configuration

The defaults provided in terraform.tfvars.example will try and book next Monday's 8PM - 8.40PM Badminton 40min slot at Leytonstone Leisure Centre every Monday at 10PM UK time. If this is not what you want, adjust the following configuration variables accordingly:

Variable	Description
better_venue_slug	The venue slug where you want to book an activity for. You can find it by visiting Better UK, selecting your venue, and looking at the URL bar.
better_activity_slug	The activity slug. You can find it by going to the booking page for the activity that you want and looking at the URL bar.
better_activity_start_time	The start time of the slot that you want to book in HHMM format (e.g. 2120 for 9.20PM).
better_activity_end_time	The end time of the slot that you want to book in HHMM format (e.g. 2120 for 9.20PM).
eventbridge_scheduler_schedule_expression	When the bot should book the desired activity slot. See Cron-based schedules for more information on the accepted syntax.

Developing locally

1. git clone this project.
2. cd into <path-to-project>/book-better.
3. Run cp .env.example .env to create a copy of the environment variables configuration. Refer to Configuration for what each individual variables mean (hopefully they're self-explanatory enough!).
4. Run poetry install to install the book_better project along its dependencies in a virtual environment.
5. Run poetry run main to run the entrypoint (located at book_better.main:main).