Every Network Engineer knows the pain of "The Silent Break." One day, everything is working fine. The next day, users are complaining that FaceTime is dropping, or managed devices aren't checking in. You check the firewall logs, you check the routes, and eventually, you find the culprit. Apple added a new domain or changed a port range on their support page. The idea for this project didn't come from a desire to write Python; it came from a conversation with my friend **Robert Hammen**. Robert pointed out a glaring gap in the ecosystem. Apple maintains a massive document [Use Apple products on enterprise networks](https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555), but there is no proper way to get a diff of what changed. They update the "Published Date," but they don't tell you _what_ line was added. You are left manually diffing a massive webpage against your firewall rules. We needed a way to pull this data programmatically, strip out the noise, and track the changes historically. ### The Trap of "Perfect" HTML My first instinct was the standard web scraping approach: fetch the page, parse the DOM, find the `<table>` tags, look for `<th>Headers</th>`, and iterate through the rows. It failed almost immediately. The problem is that we were relying on a "Structural Contract" that didn't exist. Apple’s support pages are designed for human eyes, not robot parsers. They use nested tables, inconsistent headers, and mobile responsive layouts that shift columns around. Relying on specific HTML tags made the script fragile. Every time Apple’s web team changed a CSS class, my script would break. I realized I was trying to solve a data problem with a structural tool. I needed to stop looking at the _container_ and start looking at the _content_. ### The Solution: Pattern Matching & Heuristics I scrapped the DOM-parsing approach and moved to **Context-Aware Pattern Matching**. Instead of asking the script, _"Where is the 'Port' column?"_, which is a fragile question, I started asking data-centric questions. 1. **Is this a Domain?** Does the string look like DNS? Does it contain keywords like `apple`, `icloud`, or `cdn`? 2. **Is this a Port?** Is it an integer between 0 and 65535? 3. **Proximity:** Do these two pieces of data appear in the same visual row? If a row contains `init.itunes.apple.com` and the number `443`, I don't care if the column header is missing or if the table is formatted weirdly. The data relationship is clear. ### Automation via GitHub Actions A script on my laptop doesn't solve Robert's original problem: knowing _when_ things change. I deployed the script to **GitHub Actions** on a daily cron schedule. The workflow is designed with idempotency in mind. 1. It scrapes the data every morning at 10:00 AM. 2. It generates two clean files: `domains.txt` and `ports.txt`. 3. It runs a `git diff`. 4. **The "Fail Pass":** If the files haven't changed, the script exits gracefully. It only commits to the repository if there is actual new data. ### The Result Now, instead of manually checking a support page, we have a Git repository that acts as a historical changelog. If Apple adds a new push notification server, the script catches it, commits it, and we can see exactly what changed in the commit history. Big thanks to **Robert Hammen** for identifying the friction point. Sometimes the best engineering projects aren't about building something new, but about building a bridge over a gap that shouldn't exist. Github Link: [apple_edl](https://github.com/vimrichie/apple_edl)