dvsa-practicals

Watch the DVSA site for cancellations of practical driving tests, using Python and Selenium.

The Coronavirus pandemic has hit the driving instruction industry here in the UK particularly hard. As a result of the various lockdowns and restrictions, there is a backlog of several months for appointments to sit the practical test (as I write this, there are no available appointments anywhere for ~4 months).

To compound the problem, the DVSA (the Government body responsible) appears to have abdicated any sense of responsibility for appropriately dealing with this problematic situation; meaning there is essentially a complete free-for-all. If you just happen to be on the website for the right 5 minutes, you might be able to snatch up a cancellation a few weeks away - rather than months.

Predictably, there are now a variety of services making a quick buck offering notifications when a sooner appointment becomes available, which irked me a bit, considering it took me a few hours to write this script, which does exactly the same, and is free for anyone to use.

Installation

Pre-requisites

You'll need:

• Python 3.9 or greater
• Poetry

Setup

• Download and unzip or clone this repo
• cd into it and run poetry install

Usage

For example, the following will invoke the search:

• using the licence number SMITH901019JD1AB
• for test centres near postcode WC1A
• using a search date of 2021-10-01

dvsa-practicals SMITH901019JD1AB WC1A 2021-10-01

At some point in the setup process, you are basically guaranteed to hit a captcha prompt. The program will wait while you solve the captcha and resume on success. Fortunately, the actual watching bit doesn't appear to be captcha-proofed, so you should only need to solve one captcha.

Notifications are implemented very simply, using the bell character. Consult your terminal's instructions on how to make this alert loud and obvious.

Run dvsa-practicals --help for more info on other parameters.