Project Overview

Mauch, also known as Manga Update Checker, started as a Node.js script where you just had to answer a few prompts about your favorite manga and check the latest chapter. However, I decided to turn this into a Discord bot and expand from there.

The main motivation for this project was so I wouldn’t have to check manga (My Hero Academia) on a manga reading app over and over again. Instead, the bot would notify me when a new chapter was released, saving me time. The way it checked for the latest chapter was by polling a manga reading website and web crawling to check if the HTML had changed, specifically the div that contains the list of chapters for a manga. It saves the total number of chapters in MongoDB.

This was also the project where I learned how to set up my very first infrastructure using Heroku (back when they had free dynos 🥹) and MongoDB Atlas.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on the codebase, and a lot has happened with the Discord bot API that I need to update for Mauch to work again.