^ a happy resy-cli user getting exactly the reservation he wanted
Disclaimer: This document targets a non-technical audience. For a more technical version of this README, consult PERUSEME.md.
- About
- Prerequisites
- Installation
- Authentication Setup
- Scheduling a Booking
- Booking Immediately
- Troubleshooting
- FAQ
resy-cli is a program to schedule a resy reservation booking to execute at exactly the right time in the future.
You might be asking, why would you do this? This is in fact a great question, as this project is utterly useless in low-demand markets where you're better off booking your reservation through resy's website. However in high-demand markets like NYC, reservation slots at top restaurants are snatched up in a matter of seconds.
After too many instances of losing to people who could click faster than me (or other programs 😅), I decided that enough was enough. While this project initially existed as a simple Node script, I wanted to make something that was easily distributable and usable by friends and family. A few weekends later, resy-cli was born.
resy-cli is a command-line interface, and resultingly requires some familiarity with a terminal emulator.
If you are using a Mac computer, there are plenty of resources online to help get you started with the MacOS default terminal emulator (Terminal). This should give you a good foundation to set up resy-cli on your computer.
resy-cli uses the Homebrew package manager for distribution on MacOS and Linux operating systems. Follow installation instructions from their homepage to install.
Under the hood, resy-cli uses another command-line interface called at to schedule reservations to book in the future.
While it's unnecessary to have an understanding of how at works in order to use resy-cli, it is necessary to follow some setup to activate this program on your machine. The following instructions are for MacOS (where at comes pre-installed). If you're using a different OS, these steps will vary (and you may have to install at separately).
- Execute the following command from your terminal emulator (this will prompt you for your computer's user credentials):
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.atrun.plist - Navigate to
System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy - Unlock to edit settings
- Add a new entry to "Full Disk Access"
- Press
Cmd+Shift+Gat the file selection dialog to select a custom path - Add
/usr/libexec/atrunto the list of commands/applications with "Full Disk Access"
To install resy-cli, run the following command from your terminal emulator:
brew install lgrees/lgrees/resy
If the install succeeded, you should see a success message in your terminal.
You can verify that the installation was successful by running the following command:
resy -v
If the command succeeds, you should see output like the following indicating the current version of resy-cli:
resy version 0.1.0
To view all of the commands that are available to you, run:
resy
In order to book reservations on your behalf, resy-cli needs to know about your resy account credentials. To add these, run:
resy setup
You'll be prompted to add an api key and an auth token. Follow these steps to find this information:
- Open a web browser
- Open Developer Tools (on Chrome:
Chrome > View > Developer > Developer Tools) - Navigate to resy and log in
- Open the "Network" tab with Developer Tools
- Search for requests to the domain:
api.resy.com - View the request headers
At this point, you should see something that looks like the following:
The obfuscated values associated with the keys highlighted in red are what you are looking for.
To verify that this setup was successful, run:
resy ping
If this command fails, it likely means that the credentials that you provided are incorrect. Repeat the authentication setup again to re-enter your credentials.
Once this command succeeds, you're ready to start booking!
NOTE: Resy will periodically expire your credentials. It's a good practice to run resy ping before booking to ensure that resy-cli can connect to your account.
Run:
resy schedule
Now follow the prompts to schedule your booking.
While scheduling a booking is the main intent of resy-cli, you may sometimes want to book immediately using the CLI (ex. when testing). resy book is an internal command that resy schedule uses under the hood which immediately books a reservation (analogous to clicking around in the resy UI). This command can be used in the following manner:
resy book --partySize=2 --reservationDate=2023-02-11 --reservationTimes=18:15:00 --venueId=123 --reservationTypes=""
resy-cli outputs a log file for every attempted booking (including dry runs). To view logs, run:
resy log view
Viewing log files will help to deduce what went wrong if resy-cli fails to book your desired reservation. Most often, this is due to your computer not being awake at the time of booking, or the restaurant not releasing any slots that match your criteria.
To remove all log files, run:
resy log clear
Q: How are my resy credentials stored?
A: Credentials are written to disk on your local machine and are never shared (outside of making requests to resy).
Q: What about time zones?
A: resy-cli treats the booking time that you input as system times.
As an example, if you want to book at 5:00PM and your computer is set to use the eastern time zone, you will end up attempting to book at 5:00PM eastern.
Reservation times are localized to the location of the restaurant.
Q: What if my computer is turned off / asleep at the time when I want to book a reservation?
A: resy-cli books reservations using your local machine. If the machine is turned off / asleep, booking will not complete.
To circumvent this, you can schedule your computer to wake from sleep at the time of booking. On Mac, I've used the pmset CLI to accomplish this successfully.
Q: Are reservation services okay with this?
A: It's up to users to follow the (Terms of Service) set forth by resy. resy-cli is just a tool to automate your interactions with resy (no web scraping or anything of the sort).
Q: What happens when everyone is using programs like this? Won't this stop being effective?
A: Yes.
Q: I think I found a bug, how can I report it?
A: If you have a github account, feel free to submit an issue. If not, feel free to text me.
Q: This program literally changed my life, how can I possibly thank the author?
A: Consider taking him out to dinner 🙃.