This bot tweets a #DinosaurOfTheDay under the handle @dinosauria_bot.
It tweets a random dinosaur name with some additional text pulled from the dinosaurs Wikipedia page and a link to that page.
Scraping the text from Wikipedia proved to be way harder than I imagined (see the comments on the wtf_wikipeda page for an idea of why). It now makes a reasonable attempt at extracting something meaningful from the first sentence using a hodgepodge of regex.
Assuming you already have Node.js/npm installed you can check out the source code from here:
$ git clone https://github.com/RatJuggler/dinosauria-bot.git
$ cd dinosauria-bot
Then install the packages required:
$ npm install
You can then run the bot with node app/dinosauria-bot.js.
The full list of options is as follows:
$ node app/dinosauria-bot.js --help
Usage: node dinosauria-bot.js [options]
Options:
--help Show help [boolean]
--version Show version number [boolean]
-d, --dinosaur Run for the specified dinosaur [string]
-l, --loglevel Set the logging level
[choices: "debug", "info", "error"] [default: "info"]
-m, --metrics Push metrics to this URL [string]
-q, --quiet Run without invoking the Twitter API [boolean]
-t, --test Test the Twitter access tokens. [boolean]
To see it working you can use the -q option to run without using the Twitter API but to make it fully functional you will need to
set up a Twitter account and apply for access here. The access tokens created
for the account then need to be made available as environment variables for the bot to find. The easiest way to do this is to
create a dinosauria-bot.env file from the supplied template, then edit the file and copy in your tokens.
$ cp dinosauria-bot.env.template dinosauria-bot.env
The edited file should then look something like this (not real tokens):
TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY="123abc456cde789fgh012ijkl"
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET="456cde789fgh012ijkl123abc456cde789fgh012ijkl123abc"
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN="789fgh012ijkl123abc456cde789fgh012ijkl123abc456cde"
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET="c456cde789fgh012ijkl123abc456cde789fgh012ijkl"
The bot will always look for this file in the current working directory. Test that your tokens are working by using:
$ node app/dinosauria-bot.js --test
There are also some pre-defined npm scripts you can use:
- start: Run the bot as normal.
- help: Run the bot showing the help options.
- metrics: Run the bot to test the push metrics.
- test: Run the bot to test Twitter API access.
- quiet: Run the bot in quiet mode.
- brontosaurus: Run the bot for this dinosaur.
As the bot is really only meant to tweet once a day it will send a tweet and then immediately exit. I'm running it daily with a Cron job so that it's not sat there idling for the rest of the time using the push metrics option to record its activity.
Docker build and compose files are available which create a standalone image to run the bot once a day using the push metrics option to record its activity.
Edit the docker/crontab.txt file to set your preferred timings and change the options used.
Create the image with:
$ docker build -f docker/Dockerfile -t dinosauria-bot:local .
We need to be careful that any Twitter access tokens aren't included in the image in case it is pushed to a public repository (and
it's also just best practice). There are a number of ways to inject the tokens into the image but probably the easiest is to create
a dinosauria-bot.env file as described above and then run the image with the --env-file option.
$ docker run dinosauria-bot:local -d --env-file dinosauria-bot.env
Or just use the compose file to do everything:
$ docker-compose up -d
Environment variables can be used to configure image tagging (see the file), and a simple health check, using the --test option,
is available if running under orchestration.