When I was on a recent trip, I flew Southwest Airlines. If you have fly Southwest, you know they have a system to check you into the flight 24 hours before the flight which determines your place in line. On my trip, I was busy when the check-in window opened so I couldn’t check in until 2 hours later. Because of this I ended up almost at the back of the line.

While I was on the trip, I thought to myself there has to be a way to automatically check-in to my flight especially for the return trip where I knew I would also be busy when the window opened.

When I had some free time, I started searching online and found my solution. Joey Holtzman (jdholtz) created a system that makes it super easy to setup. I choose to go with the docker container deployment over cloning the repo because I won’t fly Southwest very often so having to update the repo everytime was going to be more work then just executing a docker command.

Deployment

Since the idea of this is simplicity, no need to build out a Docker Compose file or a Portainer Stack. We will simply pull the latest image from the Docker Hub:

docker pull jdholtz/auto-southwest-check-in:latest

Then we will run the container using the following command:

docker run -d jdholtz/auto-southwest-check-in {confirmation number} {first name} {last name}

Stuff to change for your deployment:

• Confirmation Number – This needs to be the same number for your flight you recieve via email.
• First Name – This is your first name as it appears on your boarding pass.
• Last Name – This is your last name as it appears on your boarding pass.

Once you start the container, the logs should show your check-in times and information (I will grab a screenshot of it next time I use it).

The container will just sit there in the background and wait for the window to open and then execute the check-in. Simple! When I used it on my return flight from my trip, I got 3rd in line and I’m pretty sure the other 2 people in front of me paid to move up.

You probably shouldn’t fully trust this to check-in every time, southwest could update the system which breaks this or there could be a communication issue. I still check my status as soon as I can after the window opens to make sure the worked properly.