OV Chipkaart

An OV Chipkaart gem, which scrapes the OV Chipkaart website and provides an easy to use API.

The OV Chipkaart is the Dutch national transportation card for public transport. The use and transactions are regulated by the TLS.

Installation

The OV Chipkaart gem makes use of the chromedriver in combination with capybara and selenium under the hood.

For users with homebrew:

$ brew install chromedriver

Add the gem to your Gemfile:

gem 'ovchipkaart'

You might need to update the chromedriver after you ran bundle install:

$ chromedriver-update

Chromedriver update with thanks to flavorjones/chromedriver-helper and mars/chromedriver-helper.

Configuration

You need to provide your credentials from the OV Chipkaart website. You can use a hash or a YAML file:

Ovchipkaart.configure({ username: 'foo', password: 'bar'})
    
Ovchipkaart.configure_with(path_to_yaml_file)
Ovchipkaart.configure_with('config/credentials.yml')

Don't forget to put this in your .gitignore

Usage

Because the TLS doesn't provide an API for the OV Chipkaart, it scrapes the website and downloads the transactions to the filesystem for parsing. Therefore some methods might feel slow.

Balance and timestamp

ov_chipkaart = Ovchipkaart::Api.new
ov_chipkaart.balance         #=> € 45,30
ov_chipkaart.last_updated    #=> (12-10-2013 20:57)

Journeys and transactions

Every journey or transaction is a hash with ten keys: datum, checkin, vertrek, checkuit, bestemming, bedrag, transactie, klasse, product and opmerkingen.

Based on the transactie key everything is sorted in six categories:

ov_chipkaart = Ovchipkaart::Api.new

1. ov_chipkaart.journeys contains all the finish journeys.
2. ov_chipkaart.checkins contains all the checkins, when the journey starts.
3. ov_chipkaart.forgotten_checkouts contains all the journeys that started, but didn't end, because there was no checkuit. These can be used to claim your money back.
4. ov_chipkaart.additions contains all the additions to the balance of the OV Chipkaart.
5. ov_chipkaart.products contains all the additions of products to the OV Chipkaart, such as subscriptions and discounts.
6. ov_chipkaart.unclassified contains everything that couldn't be specified.

Troubleshooting

Credentials

The OV Chipkaart gem needs your credentials to login on the OV Chipkaart website.

If you have trouble configuring your credentials check the YAML for syntax errors and make sure that you only specify an username and password. Otherwise it will raise an error.

Chromedriver

Make sure you have installed the latest chromedriver. You can use homebrew to easily install the chromedriver. You might try running the chromedriver-update command, which downloads the helper for the chromedriver that is used by selenium with capybara.

The OV Chipkaart gem current uses chromedriver version 2.8.241036.

OV Chipkaart results

Since this gem relies on scraping the OV Chipkaart website, it might break during an update of the website. If you experience this issue either help out with a Pull request or send me a message.

Contributing

TODO/IDEAS:

1. Clean up the downloaded files if they are too old
2. Add configuration option for the webdriver. (Firefox and PhantonJS)
3. Add configuration option for the download path
4. Encrypt the credentials and decrypt them in runtime with an OTP.

Pull requests:

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request