What is bookmyshow_moviealert?

This project solves a very specific annoyance: waiting for movie tickets to open on BookMyShow, the popular Indian ticket booking site, and having to refresh the page over and over to check. Instead, this small Python script checks for you automatically and sends a single Telegram message the moment booking opens for the movie, theatre, or date you are watching. It runs entirely for free using GitHub Actions, so there is no server to maintain. Because GitHub's own scheduling can be too slow and unreliable for a check every few minutes, the project relies on an outside service called cron job dot org to trigger the GitHub workflow every ten minutes instead. Each time it runs, it loads the target movie's booking page through a service called ScraperAPI, which routes the request through an Indian IP address, since BookMyShow blocks requests coming from typical overseas data center servers like the ones GitHub Actions normally uses. Once it detects that booking has switched from closed to open, it sends you exactly one Telegram alert and then stays silent, tracking that it already alerted you in a small state file so you are not spammed with repeat messages. Setting it up means creating a Telegram bot through BotFather to get a token and chat ID, signing up for a free ScraperAPI key, and adding both as secrets in your GitHub repository settings. You then edit a configuration file to point at the specific movie, city, and either a particular theatre or any theatre showing on a given date, plus set up the cron job dot org trigger with a scoped GitHub access token. Once running, no ongoing manual work is needed.