shipit

What is this?

shipit is a node module that allows you to retrieve data from shipping carriers like UPS and FedEx in a common format. It interfaces with tracking APIs when available, and falls back to screen scraping. For carriers that expose tracking APIs, user is expected to acquire and provide credentials like license numbers, meter numbers, user IDs and passwords.

Carriers supported

• UPS
• FedEx

Usage

Add shipit to your package.json and then npm install it.

npm install shipit

Use it to initialize the shipper clients with your account credentials.

{UpsClient, FedexClient} = require 'shipit'

ups = new UpsClient
  licenseNumber: '1C999A999B999999'
  userId: 'shipit-user'
  password: 'shhh-secret'

fedex = new FedexClient
  key: 'xyxyxyxyabababab'
  password: 'asdfawasfdasdfasdf1'
  account: '123456789'
  meter: '99999999'

Use an initialized client to request tracking data.

ups.requestData {trackingNumber: '1Z1234567890123456'}, (err, result) ->
  console.log "[ERROR] error retrieving tracking data #{err}" if err?
  console.log "[DEBUG] new tracking data received #{JSON.stringify(result)}" if result?

Example response returned:

{
    "status": 2,
    "activities": [
        {
            "location": "Memphis, TN 38118",
            "timestamp": "2014-02-16T22:19:00.000Z",
            "details": "Departed FedEx location"
        },
        {
            "location": "East Hanover, NJ 07936",
            "timestamp": "2014-02-15T23:57:00.000Z",
            "details": "Left FedEx origin facility"
        },
        {
            "location": "East Hanover, NJ 07936",
            "timestamp": "2014-02-15T15:57:00.000Z",
            "details": "Picked up"
        }
    ],
    "weight": "0.2 LB",
    "service": "FedEx Priority Overnight",
    "eta": "2014-02-17T15:30:00.000Z",
    "destination": "US"
}

Building

Clone this repo (or first fork it)

git clone [e-mail]:sailrish/shipit.git

Install dependencies

npm install

Just use grunt.

$ grunt
Running "coffee:compile" (coffee) task

Running "mochaTest:src" (mochaTest) task
 3   -_-__,------,
 0   -_-__|  /\_/\ 
 0   -_-_~|_( ^ .^) 
     -_-_ ""  "" 

  3 passing (11ms)


Done, without errors.

Adding new shipping carriers

• Extend the common class ShipperClient
• Implement necessary methods
  • generateRequest(trk, reference)
  • requestOptions({trk, reference})
  • validateResponse(response, cb)

Credits

I learnt how to build a node module from Nick Desaulniers here. This article talks about everything you need to know - using grunt to set up test tasks, using mocha and chai for testing, and how to npm publish, etc.