wtf is movie-alert?

Movie-Alert watches BookMyShow, the Indian movie ticket booking site, and sends you a Telegram message the moment a specific movie, theatre, and date you care about opens for booking. It is meant for people trying to catch tickets the instant they go live, such as for a popular film or premiere. The whole thing runs for free using GitHub Actions instead of a server you have to keep running yourself. Because GitHub's own built in scheduler is not reliable enough for a ten minute check interval, the project relies on the free site cron-job.org to trigger the GitHub workflow every ten minutes from outside GitHub. When triggered, a Python script fetches the BookMyShow page through a service called ScraperAPI, which routes the request through an Indian IP address. This step is necessary because BookMyShow blocks requests coming from foreign or datacenter IP addresses, which is what GitHub's own servers use. The script checks whether your chosen movie, theatre, and date has switched from closed to open, and if it has, sends exactly one Telegram alert. It remembers what it last saw in a small state file so it does not send repeat alerts. Setting it up means creating a Telegram bot through BotFather, signing up for a free ScraperAPI key, adding both as secrets in your GitHub repository settings, and editing a configuration file with the movie, date, and theatre you want to watch. You also need a GitHub personal access token to let cron-job.org trigger your workflow. The project is designed to be forked, so anyone can copy it, add their own secrets and target, and run their own independent watcher and Telegram chat.