EggRateBot

Automatically fetches daily Pune egg rates and delivers them to Telegram at a scheduled time — fully automated, free, and reliable. Built to solve a real business problem: no more manually checking websites every morning.

📌 What This Project Does

Scrapes the latest Pune egg rate from https://www.e2necc.com/home/eggprice Extracts today’s rates:

• Piece
• Tray
• 100 Eggs
• Peti

Sends the formatted rate as a Telegram message

Runs automatically every ~15 minutes, triggered externally to keep GitHub Actions active

Automatically adds new subscribers when they message /start — no manual chat_id lookup needed

Supports /rate for on-demand checks anytime

🧠 Why This Exists

• Saves time for small egg businesses
• Eliminates daily manual checking
• Works without paid servers
• Runs even when your laptop is off

Designed to be:

• Simple
• Defensive
• Low maintenance

🏗️ Tech Stack

• Python 3
• requests
• beautifulsoup4
• Telegram Bot API
• GitHub Actions (workflow_dispatch)
• cron-job.org (free external scheduler, ~15 min interval) No databases. No frameworks. No overengineering.

📂 Project Structure

egg-rate-bot/
│
├── main.py                  # Core script
├── subscribers.json         # Auto-managed list of chat_ids + Telegram update offset
├── README.md                # Documentation
└── .github/
    └── workflows/
        └── egg_rate.yml     # GitHub Actions workflow (manually/externally triggered)

⚙️ How It Works (High Level)

An external scheduler (cron-job.org) calls GitHub's API roughly every 15 minutes to trigger the workflow Python script:

• Polls Telegram for new /start and /rate messages, replies accordingly
• Auto-adds any new chat_id from /start to subscribers.json (committed back to the repo)
• Fetches the webpage
• Parses the HTML table
• Finds today’s date
• Extracts rates
• Broadcasts once per day, the first run where NECC's rate is actually available
• If anything fails → sends a clear failure message
• No silent failures.

🤖 Telegram Bot Setup (One-Time)

1. Open Telegram
2. Search @BotFather
3. Create a new bot using /newbot
4. Save the Bot Token

• Each recipient must:

1. Open the bot
2. Press Start once
3. Telegram bots cannot message users who haven’t started the bot
4. No manual chat_id lookup needed — the bot detects /start automatically and adds them within ~15 minutes

🔐 Environment Variables (Required)

This project uses GitHub Secrets — no credentials are hardcoded. Add the following Repository Secrets:

Name                Description
TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN  Your Telegram bot token
TELEGRAM_CHAT_IDS   Comma-separated chat IDs (e.g. id1,id2)

⏰ Automation (External Trigger via cron-job.org)

GitHub Actions' built-in schedule cron auto-disables after 60 days of repo inactivity. To avoid that (and avoid noisy daily commits just to keep it "active"), this project uses:

• The workflow is set to trigger only on workflow_dispatch (no schedule: block)
• A free cron service (cron-job.org) sends a POST request every ~15 minutes to GitHub's Workflow Dispatch API:

https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/workflows/{workflow_file}/dispatches

with a GitHub Personal Access Token (repo scope) in the Authorization header and {"ref": "main"} as the body.

You can also trigger it manually anytime using Run workflow in the GitHub Actions tab.

🧪 Manual Testing

Before relying on automation: python main.py You should receive a Telegram message immediately. If manual run works → the scheduled trigger will work.

📤 Message Format

Example:

🥚 Egg Rate – Pune
Date: 03-01-2026
Piece: ₹6.5
Tray: ₹195
100 Eggs: ₹650
Peti: ₹1950

If data is unavailable: Egg rate unavailable today (site not reachable)

Note: /start and /rate replies arrive within ~15 minutes (polling interval), not instantly — the bot is honest about this in its own messages.

🛡️ Failure Handling

This project never sends incorrect data. Handled safely:

• Website down
• HTML structure changes
• Today’s date missing
• Network errors
• All failures result in a clear Telegram message.

🚫 What This Project Does NOT Do

❌ WhatsApp automation (paid / restricted) ❌ Store historical data ❌ Use databases ❌ Overengineer simple automation

Author

Aditya Chavan