Getting vaccinated in Korea - 잔여백신 macro

As some of you may know, you can get vaccinated with "Remaining vaccine" (잔여백신) and Kakaotalk or Naver can send you a notification to get this free vaccine. I have been getting notifications for the last few weeks, but I didn't succeed to get this free vaccine, probably because I was always too slow to claim it.

But we are in Korea, the country of the newest technologies, so obviously someone wrote a macro for this. 😁 And show some love to my friend Mahdi who helped me to debug this code and gave me all the information I needed for writing this article! He also provided the English version of the macro.

Basically, you set up your conditions and let the program search for these remaining vaccines and if it finds one, it will automatically register you for it.

IMPORTANT: Don't run the program if you don't have time to get vaccinated on the same day!

1. Open Chrome browser.

2. Log in to your Kakaotalk account. Stay Logged In should be ticked.

3. You will see a map, so hit F12 -> Network -> Ctrl + R and adjust your location where you want to get vaccinated and get the following numbers from the last left_count_by_coords: top left (x,y) and right bottom (x,y) as highlighted with the red colour. So in total, you need to have 4 numbers that will define the square on the map where the program will search for free vaccines.

For KAIST students - you can just use the following numbers:

Top Left (y,x): 36.32422482740255, 127.40315938843808

Right Bottom(y,x): 36.3999757438553, 127.28028356590578

Then you are ready to run the program. Keep the Chrome window open!

4. Go to this page: https://github.com/mahi97/CB/releases/download/v1.0.2/vaccine-run-kakao-windows.exe and download the exe file (it should be automatic). But since Mahdi is updating the code from time to time, the link sometimes doesn't work, so go to his Release page and get the latest version.

5. Then you run the exe file and follow the instructions. If your login is successful, you will see your name and it will ask you questions like which vaccine you want to register for, the Top Left (y,x) and Right Bottom(y,x) coordinates etc. You just always write only the answer and hit ENTER.

The program is running correctly if you can see these kinds of numbers.

6. If you turn this window off, you can open it again and run it with the same set-up or change it - depends on you. I ran it from 8AM and at 10:30AM I got the result. 🙏

→ RESULT: You will get this message if you will succeed 😊

Then you will also get SMS and Kakaotalk message with all the information.

→ EXTRA: Are you a programmer? You can try to play with the configurations (like a time for an update of searching etc.) in the code directly, just clone the code from GitHub: https://github.com/mahi97/CB

→ COOKIE PROBLEM - tentative: I had a problem with cookies, so Mahdi had to debug the code for me. When I would run the program, it would show me something like this

We managed to run the code correctly by changing cookie.py file lines 102 and 103.

First, go back to the map and click F12 this time Application tab -> Cookies -> parameter _kawlt and copy its value to the dictionary on line 103 as shown below.

jar = browser_cookie3.chrome(cookie_file=cookie_file, domain_name=".kakao.com")

cookie_dict = {}
cookie_dict = {'_kawlt': 'PUT YOUR _kawlt VALUE HERE'}

# 쿠키를 cookie.ini 에 저장한다

Reference:

[1] https://github.com/SJang1/korea-covid-19-remaining-vaccine-macro - the original GitHub link, while I was writing this blogpost, it got deleted from GitHub 😓

[2] https://github.com/Queue-ri/Korea-Covid-19-Vaccine-Reservation - another macro, is supposed to be faster than the one I have described.

[3] https://github.com/mahi97/CB - English translation is not perfect, but will get you through this. Thank you, Mahdi! 😉