PacktPub Grabber

Grabs Today's Free Learning eBook from PacktPub & notifies you via Email.

Dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Or, on Arch Linux:

pip2 install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

Steps to configure the script.

PacktPub Account Information

Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD on line 8 and 9 with your PacktPub username (email address) and password.

    br.form["email"] = "USERNAME"
    br.form["password"] = "PASSWORD"

Email Account Information

The script sends the email from a Gmail address you specify to your another email address. Note that, only Gmail account is accepted for sending email. I'd advise not to use your existing Gmail account since you need to enable access for less secure apps.

• Create a new Gmail account.
• Enable access for less secure apps on the (new) sending Gmail account.
• Replace the "FROM", "TO", and "EMAIL PASSWORD" on the last line with your sending Gmail address, receiving Email address and the sending Gmail account's password respectively.

    send_email("FROM", "TO", "PacktPub Grabber", outcome, "EMAIL PASSWORD")

After each run, you'll receive an email in the "TO" address with the success/failure message.

Run

Two ways to go about running the script.

Manually

To run manually, simply go to the shell and type:

    python /path/to/packtpub-grabber/packtpub-grabber.py

Automatically

Since the purpose of the script is to automate the whole process of getting a free Ebook everyday, you should choose an automated way. So, put the script on your VPS and then setup a cron job so that the script runs everyday on the given time.

Run crontab -e and add the following lines to run the script everday at 6.30 PM.

30 6 * * * python /path/to/packtpub-grabber/packtpub-grabber.py 2>>errors.log

The errors, if any, can be viewed on errors.log file.