fetch-ford-service-manuals

Downloads HTML and PDF versions of Ford Service Manuals from PTS.

Bought a 72-hour subscription to Ford's service manuals and want to save it permanently? Here's the repo for you.

These manuals are copyrighted by Ford, so don't share them!

Table of Contents

• Usage
• Results (what do I get out of this?)
• FAQ

Usage

Getting this to work currently requires some knowledge of browser DevTools. If you're not sure how to use them, ask a friend who does.

This script uses playwright, a headless browser interop library, to save documents as PDF files rather than raw HTML (this way files include images).

(Avoid) Using Windows

While this script has been verified to work on Windows natively (see issue #6), it's recommended to run it in WSL. Running in WSL makes installing things like Git and Node far easier.

WSL is a way to run Linux (Ubuntu is recommended for this project) in tandem with Windows. It's far faster than a virtual machine but still uses the real Linux kernel. Learn more and see install instructions here.

Set up Node (>16.3) and Yarn

1. Install Node.js 16.3 or newer (with corepack)
2. Run corepack enable

Get code and dependencies

1. Clone this repository with git clone https://github.com/iamtheyammer/fetch-ford-service-manuals.git, and enter the repository's directory (likely with cd fetch-ford-service-manuals)
   • Previously cloned? Run git pull to get up to date!
   • If git pull does not say Already up to date., run the next 2 steps to ensure your dependencies are up-to-date.
   • If you get an error while pulling, try running git stash, git pull, then git stash apply to un-stash your files.
2. Run yarn to download dependencies
3. Run yarn playwright-setup to download and set up Playwright

Set up PTS

1. If you haven't, purchase a PTS subscription from here. The 72 hour subscription is fine.
2. Once purchased, go to PTS: click here, then click on your subscription title.
3. Once PTS opens, navigate to your car.
   • Do not use your VIN.
   • On the left, choose By Year & Model, then select your car's year and model.
   • Press GO once selected.

2003 or newer: Get data for your car

If your vehicle was made BEFORE 2003, use these instructions.

This script requires some data about your car that's not available in the PTS GUI in order to fetch the correct manual.

1. Open DevTools, and navigate to the Network tab.
2. Click on the Workshop tab in PTS.
3. Filter for the one POST to https://www.fordservicecontent.com/Ford_Content/PublicationRuntimeRefreshPTS//publication/prod_1_3_372022/TreeAndCover/workshop/32/~WSLL/{some numbers here}. It should look similar to the request in this photo.
4. Click on that request, and look at the sent form data.
5. Open templates/params.json, and copy information from that request into the values of the JSON .workshop field.
   • Do not add fields. Only change values.
   • Change the values to match. You probably won't need to change anything under the line break.
   • If you can't find the Book Title or Wiring Book Title, look in the query string parameters. Do not leave them blank!
6. Get your wiring data: follow instructions here.

2002 or older: Get data for your car

If your vehicle was made IN 2003 or LATER, use these instructions.

1. Click on the Workshop tab in PTS.
   • You may see a couple manuals, often a "Workshop Manual" and a "Body Collision Repair Manual". You can use this application to download both-- just repeat the process for each manual, just remember to change the output path for each manual!
   • To proceed, click on either manual.
2. In the sidebar, right click on "Alphabetical Index", and click "Copy Link Address" (see picture).
3. Open templates/params.json, and change only:
   • workshop.modelYear to the year of your car
   • pre_2003.alphabeticalIndexURL to the URL you copied in step 2
   • The rest will be filled in later
4. Open DevTools in your browser.
5. Get your wiring data: follow instructions here.

All Vehicles: Get wiring data

1. Clear the DevTools Network pane (click on the trash can or circle with a line through it)
2. Click the Wiring tab at the top of PTS.
3. Filter for the GET request to this URL: https://www.fordservicecontent.com/Ford_Content/PublicationRuntimeRefreshPTS//wiring/TableofContent (there are query params at the end, that's ok). It should look similar to the request in this photo.
4. Copy the environment and bookType query params into .wiring in params.json.
   • If your vehicle was made before 2003 (or if WiringBookTitle or WiringBookCode are missing), you may find these in another request to https://www.fordtechservice.dealerconnection.com/wiring/TableOfContents (with some query params at the end):
   • booktitle → WiringBookTitle
   • book → WiringBookCode
   • Use these two requests to fill in params.json as best as you can.
5. Save params.json and open cookieString.txt
6. Clear the content in cookieString.txt, and replace it with the value of the Cookie header sent in the TableofContent request (step 3).
   • Do not include the name (cookieString.txt should not include Cookie:, for example.)
   • NOTE: In Firefox, you MUST enable the Raw toggle at the top right of Response Headers, then copy it from there. If you don't, you'll get an invalid character error when trying to fetch wiring diagrams.
7. Save cookieString.txt.

Download the manual!

To download the manual as PDFs, run yarn start -c templates/params.json -s templates/cookieString.txt -o /directory/where/you/want/the/downloaded/manual/. You should see output that looks like this.

Make sure that the directory for the downloaded manual is empty-- it'll have lots of subfolders.

You can get more param information by running yarn start --help. Notably, --saveHTML will save .html files along with the .pdf files downloaded by default, and --ignoreSaveErrors will continue downloading manuals if an error is encountered, skipping the file with an error.

It can take a little while! On a fast computer with a fast internet connection, and, more importantly, a fast disk drive, over 15 minutes to download the manuals for the 2005 Taurus. Be patient!

Also, the resulting folder is pretty sizeable. The folder for the 2005 Taurus was about 300mb, and the F150 folder was a couple gigabytes.

Results

This bot downloads the entire workshop manual and all wiring diagrams for the vehicle you set up.

All vehicles: Wiring diagrams

Wiring diagrams will be in outputpath/Wiring. There's also a toc.json file with the table of contents for the wiring diagrams.

2003 or newer: Workshop manual

The folder structure in the output directory will mimic the structure on PTS, so if a file has a path like 1: General Information -> 00: Service Information -> 100-00 General Information -> About this Manual, it will be in the folder outputpath/1: General Information/00: Service Information/100-00 General Information/About this Manual.pdf.

The cover.html file contains the book's cover and a table of contents laid out in bullet points. The tree of those bullet points directly maps to the file structure of the downloaded manual. Note that some characters are not allowed in file/folder names, so characters like slashes, colons, and more are replaced with dashes when saving.

The toc.json file contains the computer-readable table of contents, with the name mapped to the "document number", which is used to fetch the PDF.

Truncated filenames

Most operating systems limit filenames to 255 bytes (not 255 characters). For filenames over 200 characters (which are fairly rare), the downloader will truncate the name, then add (docID truncated) onto the end.

If you're having trouble finding a document with a long name, search for it in toc.json, where it will be a key with a value. That value is the docID which will be in the filename.

2002 or older: Workshop manual

Vehicles from 2002 or older have a different, harder-to-fetch structure in the manual, so this tool just uses the alphabetical index. This means the output is a bit different; you'll simply get a flat structure with all pages in the manual in the output folder you specified.

You can easily browse the manual by opening outputpath/AA_Table_Of_Contents.html-- all the links work except for the letters at the top.

There are also a few special files:

• AA_Table_Of_Contents.html is a special, processed table of contents where all the links work! Open it in your browser to navigate the manual.
• AAA_alphabeticalIndex.json is a JSON file with all the links in the alphabetical index. It's not as useful as the table of contents, but it's there if you need it. It's a result of the processing script.
• AAA_originalTableOfContents.html is the original table of contents, so the links don't work. It's there if you need it. It's a result of the processing script.

These files are prefixed with AAA so they appear at the top of the file list in most file browsers.

FAQ

Which vehicles does this work with?

All the ones I've tested. Just for fun, I tried:

• 1995 F-150
• 2002 Taurus
• 2006 Taurus/Sable
• 2008 Mustang
• 2020 MKZ
• 2022 F-150

All worked flawlessly!

How can I support this project?

If this project was helpful to you, you can support this project on GitHub sponsors (click the "Sponsor" button at the top of the page), buy me a coffee, or just share it!

Why did you make this?

I wanted to have the manual for my car, and I bought the subscription hoping to download a PDF, so that's exactly what I did!

Why do you fetch pages one-at-a-time?

Two reasons. Firstly, I don't want to DDoS Ford (they also have Akamai in front of this, and a ton of parallel requests would absolutely trigger it and get us blocked). Secondly, it was easier to code synchronously.