When something goes wrong

The tool is built to fail loudly rather than quietly record nothing. So a red run is not a disaster — it is the tool telling you, correctly, that it could not get real prices, instead of pretending it did. There are two usual causes.

The tool never signs in to Airbnb. It reads only what anyone sees without an account, so there is no sign-in to expire and no Airbnb account that a failure could put at risk.

Cause 1: the proxy did not answer

The run’s first step checks the proxy — the paid relay that makes the visits look like they come from a home internet connection. If that check fails, the run stops before it visits Airbnb at all. The log’s first lines say why.

What you do

1. Open the run on GitHub, as described on “The weekly run” page, and click the scrape job.
2. Click the step Check the proxy before spending a run on it to open it.
3. Read the message it shows (what each one means is below).
4. Fix what it names, then start a small run (one stay) to confirm.

What the message means:

• “AMAPAS_PROXY_SERVER is empty” — the proxy details were never saved in GitHub. Follow the website admin’s Price Agent Setup page, steps 07 to 09.
• “The sticky session is 10 minutes, shorter than a run” — the username saved in GitHub does not end in sessionduration-1440. Write it again as Price Agent Setup step 08 shows, and save it in GitHub again (step 09).
• Any other failure in this step — usually the proxy account has run out of traffic (the Wallet at Decodo, the proxy company, is empty), or a detail was pasted wrongly. Check the Wallet and the traffic left in Decodo’s dashboard, then paste the three details into GitHub again.

When the check works, the log says Sticky session: 1440 minutes, then Proxy works. Visiting from: followed by the country — it should say US.

Cause 2: Airbnb turned the visits away

Even through a proxy, Airbnb sometimes refuses automated visitors. When that happens nearly every listing comes back without a price, and the run stops and saves nothing. This costs nothing but the failed run. The tool keeps the same home address for 24 hours, so a run started again the same day uses the same address; a run a day or more later comes from a different one.

What you do

1. Open the stopped run on GitHub and download its sample-pages (under Artifacts, as described on “The weekly run” page).
2. Open two or three of the pictures. A puzzle, a “press and hold” box or an “access denied” message means Airbnb turned the visits away; an ordinary listing page with a price on it means the page changed and the tool needs fixing.
3. Wait for the next weekly run, or start one small run a day later.
4. If two runs in a row stop this way, tell whoever maintains the project and send them the sample pages.

Do not try to fix it by signing in to Airbnb anywhere — the tool is built never to use an Airbnb account, so that neither of yours is ever at risk.

A quick health check, any time

The doctor command is read-only and safe to run whenever you are unsure where things stand.

What you do

1. Open a terminal in the project folder.
2. Type: amapas-pricing doctor and press Enter.

It reports: that no Airbnb account is used; which browser runs and whether sample pages are kept; whether the credential and proxy settings are present; how many listings are watched and how many prices have been recorded; whether the season calendar has gaps in the next two years; the outcome of the last few runs, including any failure message; and which seasons have floors set.

Small reassurances

• An interrupted run is safe to restart the same day. Prices already recorded that day are skipped, so it picks up where it left off rather than revisiting everything.
• A failed run records nothing wrong. The abort exists precisely so that an empty run is never saved as if it were real data.
• A listing priced in another currency is handled. Prices are converted to US dollars automatically; the handful of currencies the tool cannot convert are skipped and reported, not written down wrong.
• Secrets stay out of the project. Credentials and proxy passwords live only in your local .env file and in the repository’s secrets settings on GitHub — never in the project’s files or the spreadsheet. If a credential does leak, replacing it (rotating it) is the step that actually ends the exposure.