Chargepoint has a nice feature that automatically puts you on a given waitlist at a given time of day, but this feature might have been blocked by your company’s admin. To get past the restriction, one has to be creative.

There are two APIs needed from Chargepoint:

User login
Join a waitlist identified by a numeric ID at a given time of day

With these I wrote a bash script that can put you on a waitlist from the command line, with the following provided:

User name for your Chargepoint account
Password
Waitlist ID, which you can find by joining that particular waitlist on the Chargepoint web interface and inspect the URL being fired up

With the script and the necessary info ready, you can use cron to run the script on a schedule. If you are a Mac user, you may choose launchd instead.

Note If you are scheduling the script on your laptop, make sure your laptop is not sleeping or turned off at the scheduled times.

The Script

#!/bin/bash

readonly CHARGEPOINT_COOKIE_JAR="/tmp/chargepoint-session-cookie-jar"

CHARGEPOINT_USER=
CHARGEPOINT_PASSWD=
CHARGEPOINT_WAITLIST_ID=
CHARGEPOINT_UNTIL_TIME=23

print_usage() {
    echo
    echo "Usage: $0 -u <username> -p <password> -l <waitlist-id> [-t <until-time>]"
    echo
    echo "  -u <username>:    User name of your Chargepoint account"
    echo "  -p <password>:    Password of your Chargepoint account"
    echo "  -l <waitlist-id>: Region/Waitlist you want to join"
    echo "  -t <until-time>:  Until what time of day to stay on the list [0-23]. The default is 23."
    echo "  -h:               Print this help message."
    echo
    echo "Example: $0 -u username -p passwd -l 6170941 -t 20"
    echo
}

is_number() {
    [[ $1 =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]
}

error_exit() {
    local error_msg=$1
    echo "Error: $error_msg"

    print_usage && exit 1
}

validate_cmd_args() {
    [ -z "$CHARGEPOINT_USER" ] && error_exit "Empty username!"
    [ -z "$CHARGEPOINT_PASSWD" ] && error_exit "Empty password!"

    [ -z "$CHARGEPOINT_WAITLIST_ID" ] && error_exit "Empty waitlist ID!"
    is_number $CHARGEPOINT_WAITLIST_ID || error_exit "Waitlist ID must be a numeric value!"

    is_number "$CHARGEPOINT_UNTIL_TIME" || error_exit "Time must be a numeric value!"
    [ $CHARGEPOINT_UNTIL_TIME -lt 0 -o $CHARGEPOINT_UNTIL_TIME -ge 24 ] && error_exit "Time must be in the range of [0-23]!"
}

chargepoint_login() {
    echo -n "`date` "

    curl 'https://na.chargepoint.com/users/validate' \
		-H 'origin: https://na.chargepoint.com' \
		-H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br' \
		-H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh;q=0.8,zh-CN;q=0.7,zh-TW;q=0.6' \
		-H 'x-requested-with: XMLHttpRequest' \
		-H 'pragma: no-cache' \
		-H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.103 Safari/537.36' \
		-H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8' \
		-H 'accept: */*' \
		-H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
		-H 'authority: na.chargepoint.com' \
		-H 'referer: https://na.chargepoint.com/home' \
		-H 'dnt: 1' \
        --cookie-jar $CHARGEPOINT_COOKIE_JAR \
        --data "user_name=$CHARGEPOINT_USER&user_password=$CHARGEPOINT_PASSWD&auth_code=&recaptcha_response_field=&timezone_offset=420&timezone=PDT&timezone_name=" \
        --silent --compressed

    echo
}

chargepoint_join_waitlist() {
    echo -n "`date` "

    curl 'https://na.chargepoint.com/community/activateRegion' \
        -H 'origin: https://na.chargepoint.com' \
        -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br' \
        -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh;q=0.8,zh-CN;q=0.7,zh-TW;q=0.6' \
        -H 'x-requested-with: XMLHttpRequest' \
        -H 'pragma: no-cache' \
        -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.103 Safari/537.36' \
        -H 'content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8' \
        -H 'accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01' \
        -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
        -H 'authority: na.chargepoint.com' \
        -H 'referer: https://na.chargepoint.com/dashboard_driver' \
        -H 'dnt: 1' \
        --cookie $CHARGEPOINT_COOKIE_JAR \
        --data "regionIds=$CHARGEPOINT_WAITLIST_ID&untilTime=$CHARGEPOINT_UNTIL_TIME" \
        --silent --compressed

    echo
}

while getopts ":u:p:l:t:h" OPTION; do
  case $OPTION in
     u) CHARGEPOINT_USER=$OPTARG;;
     p) CHARGEPOINT_PASSWD=$OPTARG;;
     l) CHARGEPOINT_WAITLIST_ID=$OPTARG;;
     t) CHARGEPOINT_UNTIL_TIME=$OPTARG;;
     h) print_usage && exit;;
     ?) print_usage && exit;;
  esac
done

main() {
    validate_cmd_args

    chargepoint_login
    chargepoint_join_waitlist
}

main

Future Improvement

To be more user friendly, instead of asking for waitlist ID, use waitlist name from the UI instead. This requires another API to get the list of waitlists/regions.