Vessel Tracking: Automated Shipping Cut-Off Monitor for MSC, Evergreen, COSCO & OOCL — One Dashboard

Ocean freight operations depend on two critical dates per booking: the Earliest Receiving Date, which determines when cargo can be delivered to the terminal, and the Rail Cut-Off Date, which sets the last moment for rail cargo to reach the port. These dates change frequently — and missing a change means missed cargo, rerouting costs, and client penalties. Freight forwarders managing dozens of active bookings across MSC, Evergreen, COSCO, and OOCL were logging into four separate carrier portals multiple times per day, copying dates into spreadsheets, and manually comparing to detect changes. There was no automated alerting system.

We built Vessel Tracking as a Django + React platform with four dedicated carrier scrapers. MSC requires authenticated headless browser access via Playwright: the scraper launches a headless Chromium browser with a randomised fake user agent, accepts the cookie consent banner, navigates the two-stage email/password login form, waits 10 seconds for session establishment, fills in the booking number, and extracts Rail Open and Rail Cut-Off dates from the gridCutOff table. Evergreen tracking runs through Shipmentlink via direct POST requests with session cookies — submitting the booking number with TYPE=BK and SEL parameters and extracting ERD and cut-off dates from specific table row/column positions via BeautifulSoup. COSCO exposes a public REST API (no auth required) — a single call with the booking number and a Unix millisecond timestamp returns JSON with cutOff and erd fields. OOCL routes through an internal microservice proxy that handles all OOCL-specific scraping and returns processed data to Django. The automated tracking engine marks each booking as in-progress during scraping to prevent duplicate updates, scrapes the carrier, uses python-dateutil to normalise varied carrier date format strings, copies current dates to old_ fields before overwriting, and resets is_read=False on the notification. The React dashboard renders both current and old dates side-by-side in the booking table, with Flatpickr date filter controls for ERD and Rail Cut-Off columns.

Django 5 + DRF API. JWT authentication. Celery + django-crontab for scheduled carrier scraping (4-hour standard refresh, 5-minute OOCL fast refresh). Playwright + fake-useragent for MSC authenticated headless scraping. BeautifulSoup + lxml for Evergreen HTML parsing. requests for COSCO REST API and OOCL microservice proxy. python-dateutil for carrier date normalisation. PostgreSQL with new_entry concurrency lock. Threading for non-blocking immediate first scrape. React + Reactstrap + Redux + ApexCharts dashboard. react-select + Flatpickr for filtering.