nhihin/pricetracker

Automatic scraping and tracking of prices of products of interest (only supports Chemist Warehouse and Sephora so far)

PriceTracker

Automatic scraping and tracking of prices of products of interest using R.

Setup

• The productList.csv details the products of interest. It must have three columns:
  • Store: Only supports ChemistWarehouse or Sephora at the moment.
  • Product: Alphanumeric name of the product.
  • URL: Valid URL to the product on the website.

Running the script manually

In Terminal, run the following:

chmod +x main.R
./main.R

Running the script automatically, once per day

This can be done with a cron job, see here for details for setting one up on Mac: https://betterprogramming.pub/https-medium-com-ratik96-scheduling-jobs-with-crontab-on-macos-add5a8b26c30

1. Run crontab -e in Terminal; this opens up a vim editing window. Press i to get into editing mode.
2. Add the following cron command: 0 0 * * * cd ~/Documents/Projects/PriceTracker && ./main.R (change the path to wherever the directory was cloned).
3. Escape, type :x, and press Enter to save changes.

Output Files

• productPrices.csv: CSV file that includes columns for today's date, current price, RRP, whether the product is on sale, the discount, and discount as a proportion of RRP.
• priceTrackerPlot.pdf: Plot of the prices of each product over time.