Command line tool for alerting price drops in the Sony Entertainment Network aka Playstation Network

The Sony Entertainment Network (SEN) uses CIDs to identify items in it's catalogue. In order to alert you on the desired price of an SEN you need the CID. Use your Browser (cid GET parameter in URL) or this script (--search) to retrieve the CID.

In order to check the price of an item. You need a store identifier. These store identifiers are known to work:

• DE/de
• GB/en
• US/en

Prices are always in the local currency. Therefore it is € for DE/de and £ for GB/en. Additionaly, prices are that for PlayStation Plus users.

Just run python psnmailalert.py for mail alerting. See example below.

usage: psncli.py [-h] [--id ID] [--container CONTAINER] [--store STORE]
                 [--price PRICE] [--query QUERY]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --id ID, -i ID        CID of game to check
  --container CONTAINER, -c CONTAINER
                        Container to list
  --store STORE, -s STORE
                        regional PSN store to check. Default: 'DE/de'
  --price PRICE, -p PRICE
                        desired price of game
  --query QUERY, -q QUERY
                        Name of item to search for

You may have to tell Python that your terminal is capable of dealing with UTF-8 outputs. Some PSN items are annoted with trademark, copyright or foreign language specific symbols. To do so set export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 in your terminal window.

You may run this script with the following command line variants:

With psnmailalert.py you may set alerts for price drops in the alerts.csv file. The first value is the CID for the item, the second is the price to be matched in order to alert you by mail, and the second value is the store to search in. You may mix stores in the alerts.csv. After a price has been matched, the alert is removed from alerts.csv. You will not get any further alerts for that item.

EP0001-NPEJ00305_00-B000000000001030,19.00,DE/de
EP0101-ULES01372_00-GPCMETALGE000001,10.00,DE/de

In order to receive mails you have to set your account settings in the file mailconfig.json. See mailconfig.json_example for an example config.

To run psnmailalert.py, just type:

./psnmailalert.py

Define the name of a game and the store.

./psncli.py --query "metal gear solid peace walker psp" --store DE/de

You will get a result containing one to many search results with the CID. The first output of each search line is the CID, the second the name, the third the supported systems and the last is a description of the item type in the local store language. It is "Vollversion" here which means "full version" in German.

EP0101-ULES01372_00-GPCMETALGE000001	Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker [PSP]	PS Vita, PSP®	19.99	Vollversion

The price is in local currency. As exit statuses render the outcome of the alert, you may send you e-mails or desktop notifications with && or ||. In this example, there is a string printed to the console.

./psncli.py --cid EP0101-ULES01372_00-GPCMETALGE000001 --store DE/de --price 15.00 &&
echo "Price matched, let's buy Metal Gear Solid PW"