Description:

Package Tracker is a Node.js application that interfaces with several tracking API's (such as USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL) as well as a SQL database.

Purpose:

Over the holiday season, my wife and I ordered a lot of packages from different online vendors. I found myself constantly searching around for tracking numbers in my email to check the delivery status of the packages. I started to leave browsers open with the inputted tracking numbers for quick reference, but then forgot which tracking number belonged to each item. This is when I came up with the idea to make a lightweight package tracking application. I didn't need a robust front end UI and decided to use Node.js with inquirer (for basic command-line navigation).

Challenges:

This project was pretty straight forward and there wasn't many challenges over all. The main hurdle was interfacing with the different shipping carrier's APIs since documentation left a lot to be desired. After starting to build out the requests for FedEx, I decided to opt into using another package, shipIt, to reduce the amount of setup involved to communicate with the shipping carrier API's.

Setup:

There is a little setup involved with this application since I didn't want to expose my API keys. To do this, I created a apikeys.sql file that is listed in the gitignore file. To recreate this file, I have included the schema below:

DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS packagetrackerapikeys;
CREATE DATABASE packagetrackerapikeys;

USE packagetrackerapikeys;

CREATE TABLE carrierapikeys (
    id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    carrier VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    friendly_name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    current_api_status INT,
    api_key VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    username VARCHAR(255),
    password VARCHAR(255),
    account_number VARCHAR(255),
    meter_number VARCHAR(255)
);

INSERT INTO carrierapikeys (carrier, friendly_name, current_api_status, api_key, username, password, account_number, meter_number)
    VALUES 
    ('ups','UPS',0,'*********','*********','*********','',''),
    ('fedex','FedEx',0,'*********','','*********','*********','*********'),
    ('dhl','DHL',0,'','*********','*********','',''),
    ('usps','US Postal Service',0,'*********','*********','*********','','')
;

SELECT * FROM carrierapikeys

Future Plans:

Even though Package Tracker was able to solve my basic needs for tracking packages and adding custom tags, there are a few things that I plan to add. Some of these ideas are:

• Add additional mail carriers such as Amazon.com.
• Create an in-depth tracking option to show every update for given packages.
• Allow for multiple users and separate databases for saved packages.
• Add option for Recent search history.
• Move saved package databases to a hosted server.

Sample Images:

• Main menu

  

• Search functionality

  

• Saved Packages