Recently, I was waiting on some packages to arrive via DHL Germany. As I also had some spare time, and it was raining outside, I was playing around with PowerShell and DHL’s API to see if I can get status of my packages in a nice (to me), formatted way.

TL;DR: I can. 🙂

The idea was to build a small script which will take in a list of tracking numbers from my incoming packages, check their latest statuses and any history it can find, and display it in a nice, formatted way.

So, it all started with exploring the API possibilities on DHL’s Developer website.

To be able to use their APIs, you must register (for a free account):

Next, you have to request API access, so that you get your API key and secret – you do this by creating an app and selecting APIs it will use (selected Shipment Tracking – Unified, as it sounded right):

Then you wait a bit for someone/something to approve your request (few minutes), and you are ready to go:

Now you have all the building blocks, and it’s time to code… finally. 🙂

I won’t explain the code line by line (it’s not that interesting and it could be written nicer), but will just say that I used the help of (the free) ChatGPT (or rather – it used my ideas?! Who knows… 😁), and “vibe-coded” the whole thing. There were errors, misunderstandings, etc., but we managed to get to something that does the job:

Just one thing – as I was looking at the outputs, I’ve seen these “detailed info” codes, and decided to explore what they mean – for this, I found a CSV file with the explanations, which I then decided to incorporate into my script… just for fun.

The script (Track-DHLShipment.ps1) is available on my GitHub.

What’s next? Don’t know… probably my packages will indeed arrive. 🙂

Cheers!

P.S. This was somewhat inspired by an episode from “Scott and Mark Learn To…” series of podcasts by Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich – make sure you subscribe and watch them regularly! They rock! 😊