What is upass?

If you live somewhere with a UPass, a discounted transit pass that typically needs to be reactivated each month, you've probably forgotten to renew it at least once and ended up paying full price for a ride. This tool, called UPass Renewer, handles that monthly activation for you automatically, so you never have to think about it again. The project runs as a small web service on your computer or server. Once it's set up, it takes care of submitting the renewal on your behalf each month. There's a web interface involved, and it stores your transit account details so it can log in and complete the activation without you being present. Security is clearly a concern here, since the service needs to store your login credentials. The tool encrypts that data with a password you provide. After every restart you have to visit a specific page in the web interface and enter that password to unlock the stored information. This means your credentials aren't sitting in plain text on disk, but it also means the auto-renewal won't work after a reboot until you've manually unlocked it. The audience is fairly specific: transit riders in regions that use a UPass program, likely students or employees at participating institutions. If you're comfortable running a small background service and want to skip the monthly renewal chore, this saves you a recurring task. That said, the setup assumes some familiarity with running applications from a command line, and the project is small and lightly maintained, so it's best suited for someone willing to tinker a bit.