ally_balance

Get an alert with your Ally Bank account balances. This is something that Wells Fargo provides, but is not provided by Ally Bank at this time. This script will log into Ally Bank on your behalf and fetch your account balances, then send them to you via the channel of your choosing.

Preparing the alert

This package uses IFTTT to send alerts. This script acts as a webhook trigger, so you must set up a new webhook before using this script.

First, log into (or register for an account at) ifttt.com and navigate to applets. Click "New Applet".

Select "Webhooks" as the service.

Give your webhook an event name. Hang onto this, because you'll need it later.

From there, you'll have the option to send your account balances to any number of services. I chose to receive my account balances via email.

Installation

To install this package, run:

npm install -g ally_balance

This will install a new command line script: ally_balance

The script relies on four environment variables for proper operation:

ALLY_BANK_USERNAME  The username for your Ally Bank account
ALLY_BANK_PASSWORD  The password for your Ally Bank account
IFTTT_ALLY_EVENT_NAME   The event name for the webhook you set up above
IFTTT_API_KEY   Your IFTTT API key

Once you have created these environment variables in the scope of where the script will be run (either via something like a .bash_profile or prepended to the command line invocation below), invoke the script without any parameters:

ally_balance

This will log into your bank account using chromeless, scrape your account balances, then trigger your IFTTT webhook using this information as value1. Now you can set up a cron job to deliver your account balances as often as you'd like. That's all there is to it!

Known Issues

• Ally Bank will sometimes put a verification code interstitial after the login, which the script will not be able to handle programmatically. Simply visit allybank.com in a browser from the same IP address as the computer where your script will run, and select "Trust this computer".