David-McKenna / chime_repeaters_observer

CHIME repeaters observer

Python script to query the CHIME repeaters page (http://chime-frb.ca/repeaters) repetitively. Upon (a) new burst(s) announcement, the script will send a message with burst(s) details to a slack channel.

Before we start

1. Create a new app for your Slack workspaces, providing the following scopes rights to allow you to modify previous message programmatically if required: [channels:history, chat:write, files:write, groups:history, im:write].

2. Generate a "Bot User OAuth Access Token" and store it somewhere safe, to be loaded as an environement variable called SLACK_API_TOKEN, which will be used by the script.

3. Create a dedicated channel (if desired). You then need to set the CHANNEL variable with this channel name; e.g. CHANNEL = '#chime-repeaters-observer'.

Prerequisites and execution

Install required packages included in requirements.txt. I suggest to run the following in a virtual environment. Example:

cd /home/<user>/<path_to_chime_repeaters_observer>

# (Install virtualenv if necessary)
pip3 install virtualenv

# Create a virtual environment coined `topology-env` for the project
virtualenv env

# Activate the environment
source env/bin/activate

# Install required packages
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

# Make script executable
chmod +x chime_repeaters_observer.py

# Start the script
run_path=/home/<user>/<path_to_chime_repeaters_observer>
/usr/bin/nohup $run_path/chime_repeaters_observer.py 2>&1 >> $run_path/chime_repeaters_observer.log &

# Deactivate when done working on this project to return to global settings
deactivate

Notes on current version

No main has been written so far, as it seemed unnecessary. Also, note that I have set a variable called debug to True by default. It would simply print what would be sent to slack. If debug = False, it will start sending messages. By default, a query to CHIME's server is done every 10 minutes. This can be changed by modifying the variable WAIT_MINUTES near the beginning of the script. nohup's tip came from Leon Oostrum. requests.post("https://catalog.chime-frb.ca/repeaters", data={}).json() came from David Gardenier. Hence, kudos to them.

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Copyright (c) Dany Vohl / macrocosme, 2020.