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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

Section titled “The complete val”

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

dailyScraper.tsRun in Val Town ↗
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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “Next steps”