What's The Best Way To Drive A Browser Headlessly On Heroku For My Purposes?

Reworded completely: My vision: Web interface that takes email, student ID, password and desired class as parameters for heroku script. And then once a spot is open, use a webdrive

Solution 1:

If you're needing to use Javascript in your application or just find it easier to script a browser than using requests or urllib2, a headless browser is a good way to go. I'd personally recommend phantomjs as it's quite easy to use in node, js, or python.

You'll need a custom buildpack, which is fairly easy to install, here's a good one. Note, this requires the cedar stack.

Here's a bit of info on adding a buildpack.

And here's example setup code from the README of the buildpack repo:

$ heroku create --stack cedar-14 --buildpack https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi$ echo"https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-apt" >> .buildpacks$ echo"https://github.com/srbartlett/heroku-buildpack-phantomjs-2.0.git" >> .buildpacks$ cat <<EOT >> Aptfile
libicu52
libjpeg8
libfontconfig
libwebp5
EOT

$ git push heroku master

Hope that helps!