NC-DMV-Scraper is a tool you can use to become aware of DMV appointments right when they become available, without all the extra work of constantly manually monitoring the DMV website.

It uses selenium to scrape appointment locations, dates, and times, from https://skiptheline.ncdot.gov/.

I strongly recommend you set it up yourself, but if you are entirely unwilling to do that ( even though it is quite easy ), you could reach out to me ( tommy092464_62746 on discord, or via github issues ) and pay me like 5 bucks a month, with absolutely no uptime guarantees ( e.g. if my power, or internet go out, that sucks for you. ).

If this tool helped you out a lot, consider buying me a coffee:

Setup ( Native, no Docker )

If you have never heard of docker, then this is the tutorial you follow to set up the tool:

In order to set it up, you must first install Firefox, python, selenium, and the selenium geckodriver

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

https://www.python.org/downloads/

https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases

then, you must install the dependencies

open a terminal and run

pip3 install requests geopy selenium

if that does not work, try

python -m pip install requests geopy selenium

Then, download the code for this by clicking the green code button in the top right, and clicking download zip. Open that zip up, and extract it somewhere.

Then, you need to get the file path for the geckodriver you downloaded, open up scrapedmv.py in a texteditor, and replace the line that says this:

GECKODRIVER_PATH = os.getenv('GECKODRIVER_PATH','YOUR_GECKODRIVER_PATH_HERE') # Replace with your geckodriver path

with your geckodriver path, like this:

GECKODRIVER_PATH = '/home/tommy/.cache/selenium/geckodriver/linux64/0.35.0/geckodriver' # Replace with your geckodriver path

Your format will depend on your operating system, e.g. on windows it may be like GECKODRIVER_PATH = 'C:/Users/tommy/Downloads/0.35.0/geckodriver.exe' or something like that. if you are on Windows, you will likely be default get a format like C:\Users\tommy\Downloads\0.35.0\geckodriver.exe. you need to replace all of those \ with /, so that it looks like the above example.

Then, you need to go to discord, and create a webhook in a server you own ( make a server if you dont have one ) You can do that by going to the server, right clicking a channel -> edit channel -> integrations -> webhooks -> new webhook -> copy webhook url

Then open up scrapedmv.py in a text editor, and replace the line that says this:

YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL = os.getenv("YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL", "YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE") # !!! REPLACE WITH YOUR ACTUAL WEBHOOK URL !!!

with your webhook url, like this:

YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL = "https://discord.com/api/webhooks/10920931091/-JAOIFJWjenirieojOAJOIWjonfrreywoijojwojoOIAJODAab3" # !!! REPLACE WITH YOUR ACTUAL WEBHOOK URL !!!

( that is not a real webhook url to be clear ) ( do notice the quotes around the webhook URL, those are necessary. )

Then, you just run python3 scrapedmv.py, and every 10 minutes or so it will start the scraping process. That is all you have to do to get it up and running!

Appointment type

You can choose the type of appointment by editing scrapedmv.py on the line where it says

APPOINTMENT_TYPE = os.getenv("APPOINTMENT_TYPE", "Driver License - First Time")

you can change that to

APPOINTMENT_TYPE = "Fees"

or

APPOINTMENT_TYPE = "Non-CDL Road Test"

or any of the other button names on the appointment choosing section of the website, just make sure you get the exact name from skiptheline.ncdot.gov. e.g. if you were to say

APPOINTMENT_TYPE = "Non CDL Road Test"

That would fail, because it would only find the one with the -, and that would not match.

You can also change this with docker by setting environment variables

docker run -e YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL="PUT_YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE" -e APPOINTMENT_TYPE="Teen Driver Level 1" ghcr.io/tmcelroy2202/nc-dmv-scraper:latest

Filtering

There is also appointment filtering you can apply in that file:

You can set an address, and a distance range, and have it only look for dmv locations within that range of miles from the given address

You would do that by changing these values

YOUR_ADDRESS = os.getenv("YOUR_ADDRESS")
DISTANCE_RANGE_MILES_STR = os.getenv("DISTANCE_RANGE")

so that they looked like this:

YOUR_ADDRESS = "1337 Testing Lane, Charlotte NC"
DISTANCE_RANGE_MILES_STR = "40"

You can also set specific time and date ranges to scan for, by changing these lines:

DATE_RANGE_START_STR = os.getenv("DATE_RANGE_START")
DATE_RANGE_END_STR = os.getenv("DATE_RANGE_END")
DATE_RANGE_RELATIVE_STR = os.getenv("DATE_RANGE")
TIME_RANGE_START_STR = os.getenv("TIME_RANGE_START")
TIME_RANGE_END_STR = os.getenv("TIME_RANGE_END")

examples of things you could do with them are:

DATE_RANGE_START_STR = "01/23/2025"
DATE_RANGE_END_STR = "09/23/2025"

to only show appointments from 01/23/2025 to 09/23/2025.

or

DATE_RANGE_RELATIVE_STR = "2w"

to only show appointments in the next 2 weeks ( could also do 1m for one month, or 5d for 5 days, etc. )

or

TIME_RANGE_START_STR = "3:00"
TIME_RANGE_END_STR = "19:00"

to only show appointments from 3:00AM to 7:00PM.

You can also edit the intro message, by default it is: "@everyone Appointments available at https://skiptheline.ncdot.gov:\n" but you can change it by editing the file ( or by environment variables ) via this line:

INTRO_MESSAGE = os.getenv("INTRO_MESSAGE", f"@everyone Appointments available at {NCDOT_APPOINTMENT_URL}:\n")

This allows you to, for example, remove the @everyone ping.

INTRO_MESSAGE = f"Appointments available at {NCDOT_APPOINTMENT_URL}:\n"

You can also make it notify you after it runs even when appointments arent available, if that gives you peace of mind to make sure the script is still running, by editing this line ( or via environment variables ):

PROOF_OF_LIFE = os.getenv("PROOF_OF_LIFE", False)

if you set it to true, it will notify you after each run

PROOF_OF_LIFE = True

Docker

In order to run a pre-built image

docker run -e YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL="PUT_YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE" ghcr.io/tmcelroy2202/nc-dmv-scraper:latest

To run via docker with custom filtering arguments, you would do, for example:

docker run -e YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL="PUT_YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE" -e YOUR_ADDRESS="1337 Testing Lane, Charlotte NC" -e DISTANCE_RANGE=50 -e DATE_RANGE_START="03/23/2025" -e DATE_RANGE_END="09/23/2025" -e TIME_RANGE_START="8:00" -e TIME_RANGE_END="9:00" ghcr.io/tmcelroy2202/nc-dmv-scraper:latest

or, if you wish to build the docker container locally, clone the repo, cd into it, and:

Docker build

docker build -t nc-dmv-scraper .

then

Run Container

docker run -e YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL="PUT_YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE" nc-dmv-scraper

Docker Compose

If you wish to run via docker compose, you can just git clone this repository, set your webhook URL in docker-compose.yml, then run

docker compose up -d

If you wish to customize the environment variables, they can be edited in docker-compose.yml like this:

services:
  dmv-scraper:
    image: ghcr.io/tmcelroy2202/nc-dmv-scraper:latest
    container_name: nc-dmv-scraper
    environment:
      # --- IMPORTANT: Update this ---
      YOUR_DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL: "YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE"

      # --- Extra Configuration ---
      APPOINTMENT_TYPE: "Driver License - First Time"
      YOUR_ADDRESS: "1337 Testing Lane, Charlotte NC"
      DISTANCE_RANGE: 50
      DATE_RANGE_START: "03/23/2025"
      DATE_RANGE_END: "09/23/2025"
      # do not use date_range relative ( e.g. 2w ) AND date_range_start / date_range_end at same time. use one or the other.
      DATE_RANGE: "2w"
      # TIME_RANGE_START: "8:00"
      # TIME_RANGE_END: "19:00"
    restart: unless-stopped

Beta

I have written a purely requests based version of this scraper, which does not require selenium, but it also has not gotten extensive testing yet. If you want to try it out, have a look at #15, and have a look at beta_requests_scrape.py.