charizard-tracker

A small dashboard that tracks PSA-graded prices for five iconic Charizard cards, scraped hourly and rendered as interactive Chart.js timelines.

What it tracks

Five cards × three PSA grades (9 / 9.5 / 10):

• Japanese Expansion Pack 1996
• Base Set
• Base Set 2
• Shadowless
• 1st Edition

Each card has its own dock card with current prices and a sparkline; clicking opens a detail panel with a stacked line chart and time-range selector (1W / 1M / 3M / 6M / 1Y / MAX).

Stack

• Node.js + Express
• EJS for server-rendered HTML
• SQLite (sqlite3) for storage
• Puppeteer for scraping
• node-cron for the hourly schedule
• Chart.js on the client

No build step, no framework, no bundler.

Run locally

npm install
node server.js
# → http://localhost:5000

The server initializes prices.db if it doesn't exist, kicks off one scrape on startup, and then scrapes every hour on the hour.

How it works

1. scraper.js opens each card's pricecharting.com page in headless Chrome and reads the PSA 9 / 9.5 / 10 prices off the page.
2. server.js schedules the scrape and writes results to prices.db via db.js.
3. The / route fetches each card's price history (filtered by ?range=1w|1m|3m|6m|1y|max) and renders views/index.ejs, which builds the dock + detail chart on the client.

Files

File	What it does
server.js	Express app, cron schedule, route handlers
scraper.js	Puppeteer scrape logic, card list
db.js	sqlite3 helpers (initDB, insertPrice, getPriceHistory)
views/index.ejs	Single-page UI
public/css/style.css	Dark theme + glassmorphism
public/images/	Card thumbnails + background

Notes

The price database is not committed — scraped pricing data from pricecharting.com belongs to them. Run the app for an hour or two and you'll have your own.

License

ISC