Stern Grove Lottery Bot

A headless automation that watches for open Stern Grove Festival ticket lotteries, fills the registration form, and emails you the result — daily, hands-free, via GitHub Actions.

How it works

1. Discover open lotteries — A headless Chromium browser loads sterngrove.org/lineup2026 and reads window.TixologiWidget.concerts — a JavaScript object Stern Grove injects at page load containing each concert's lottery open and close datetimes. The script compares the current time against those windows and skips any concert already recorded in entered-lotteries.json.

2. Navigate to the registration form — Once an eligible concert is found, the browser navigates to the Tixologi registration form at events.tixologi.com/event/{id}/lottery. Before loading the page, a page.route() intercept is registered so that any validate-captcha network request is fulfilled with a synthetic success response — the real registration POST still goes through normally.

3. Fill and submit the form — All personal and demographic fields are filled from environment variables: first name, last name, email, 4 tickets, zip code, gender, age range, ethnicity, annual household income, N/A for group affiliation, and the code of conduct checkbox. The script waits for the submit button to become enabled (it starts disabled pending CAPTCHA validation), then clicks it and waits for a confirmation element.

4. Send a notification email — On success, a confirmation email is sent via Resend with the artist, show date, and entry timestamp. On any failure, an error email is sent with the full traceback.

5. Record the entry and commit — The successful entry is appended to entered-lotteries.json and committed back to the repository using a GitHub PAT — so the next run's duplicate-entry check sees the full history even across fresh runner environments.

Stack

Tool	Role
Playwright	Headless browser automation
Resend	Transactional email
GitHub Actions	Daily cron (5 17 * * * — 10:05am PDT)
Entire	Agentic git

Stern Grove lotteries open 6 weeks before each show at 10am and stay open for one week. The script enters at most one lottery per run.

GitHub Actions setup

Fork or clone the repo, then add the following secrets under Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions:

Secret	Description
FIRST_NAME	Your first name
LAST_NAME	Your last name
EMAIL	Email for the lottery registration
ZIP_CODE	Your zip code
GENDER	male, female, non-binary, other, or prefer-not-to-answer
AGE	under-18, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, or 65-plus
ETHNICITY	asian, black, hispanic, middle-eastern, native-american, white, mixed, other, or prefer-not-to-answer
ANNUAL_HOUSEHOLD_INCOME	under-40k, 40k-80k, 80k-120k, 120k-200k, 200k-500k, 500k-plus, or prefer-not-to-answer
RESEND_API_KEY	API key from resend.com
RESEND_FROM	Verified sender address, e.g. bot@yourdomain.com
NOTIFY_EMAIL	Where to send success/failure notifications
GIT_TOKEN	GitHub PAT with repo scope, for committing state
GIT_REPO	Format: owner/repo-name

Trigger a manual test run from Actions → Stern Grove Lottery → Run workflow.

Running locally

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
playwright install chromium --with-deps

# Copy and fill in your env vars
cp .env.example .env

# Run
python3 lottery.py

If a lottery is open today, the script enters it and commits the result. If nothing is open it exits cleanly with a log message.

# Run tests
pytest tests/ -v
# 21 passed

State file

entered-lotteries.json is committed to the repo after every successful entry:

[
  {
    "concert_id": 7,
    "event_id": "11998",
    "artist": "Khruangbin",
    "show_date": "june 28",
    "entered_at": "2026-06-21T17:07:44+00:00",
    "status": "submitted"
  }
]

The concert_id is the zero-based index into window.TixologiWidget.concerts, which the script checks before entering to prevent duplicate submissions.