Scrape a website daily and email yourself the results

The classic recipe for this is a Python script, a crontab entry on a server you keep running, and SMTP credentials for the email step. On Val Town it's one file: a cron-triggered val that fetches the page, extracts what you want, and emails it to you with std/email. The scheduler and the email service are built into the platform.

The complete val#

This example scrapes the Hacker News front page and emails you the top five story titles:

import { email } from "https://esm.town/v/std/email";
import { load } from "npm:cheerio";

export default async function (interval: Interval) {
  const res = await fetch("https://news.ycombinator.com");
  const $ = load(await res.text());

  const titles = $(".titleline > a")
    .toArray()
    .slice(0, 5)
    .map((el, i) => `${i + 1}. ${$(el).text()}`);

  await email({
    subject: "Hacker News top 5 today",
    text: titles.join("\n"),
  });
}

That's the whole thing — fetch gets the HTML, cheerio extracts the titles with a CSS selector, and std/email delivers them to the email address on your Val Town account.

Set it up#

1. Create a val and add a file. Click the + button in the top right of the editor and select CRON.
2. Paste in the code above and click Run to test it — the email should arrive in your inbox within a few seconds.
3. Click the Cron trigger and set the schedule to 0 9 * * * to run once a day at 9am UTC.

To scrape a different site, swap the URL and the CSS selector. The web scraping guide shows how to find the right selector with your browser's dev tools.

Scheduling notes#

• Cron expressions are evaluated in UTC, so adjust for your timezone — crongpt.com handles the conversion for you.
• On the free plan, crons can run up to once every 15 minutes (or once a minute on Pro) — a daily job is well within that.
• On the free plan, std/email only sends to your own account email, which is exactly what this job needs.

Next steps#

• Cron reference — schedule types and the Interval handler
• std/email reference — subject, attachments, and sending limits
• Web scraping guide — finding CSS selectors and scraping JavaScript-rendered pages with a headless browser