jeromecc / meow

Daily Bruin's homemade social media manager

meow

Daily Bruin's Twitter and Facebook poster

Table of Contents

• Technologies Used
• Services Used
• Structure
• Getting Started
• Adding A Database Field

Technologies Used

• Docker is our way of putting the code for meow in "containers" so you can run it the same on any machine.

Frontend

• React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Backend

• Django is a Web framework that makes working with databases easier!
• Celery is a task scheduler that runs certain "tasks" at certain intervals.

Services Used

• Pyup is something you'll become very familiar with, as it checks all the dependencies for meow and tells you when it's time to update!

Structure

.
├── Dockerfile
├── LICENSE
├── Procfile
├── Procfile.dev
├── docker-compose.yml
├── entrypoint-dev.sh
├── entrypoint.sh
├── meow
│   ├── manage.py
│   ├── meow
│   ├── scheduler
│   ├── static
│   └── templates
├── production.yml
├── rancher.yml
├── readme.md
└── requirements.txt

Getting Started

0. Grab this repo, create an .env

Clone the repository, then create a .env file at the top level.

git clone https://github.com/daily-bruin/meow.git
cd meow
echo -e "REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379/\nDATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres@db:5432/postgres\n" > meow/.env

Be sure to also add a SLACK_ENDPOINT variable. You can get the value of it here.

1. Build images

Next, pull and build the relevant Docker images. Make sure you have Docker running! (Mac users: there should be a whale icon in your status bar.)

docker-compose build

2. Run migrations

We then need run some migrations to set up the database.

docker-compose run web meow/manage.py migrate

3. Initialize some variables

Now let's initialize some of the runtime configuration necessary for meow to run.

docker-compose run web meow/manage.py init

4. Create a superuser

docker-compose run web meow/manage.py createsuperuser

The Username should be your name and Email Address should be your media email. Make sure you remember your password for later!

5. Start meow

Now we need to start meow! You'll be doing this a lot, so be sure to remember this command:

docker-compose up

If you ever get an error about ERROR: Pidfile (celerybeat.pid) already exists. or something similar, you need to remove the celerybeat.pid file that has been created. A simple rm celerybeat.pid and you're good to go! Speaking of Celery...

6. Check it out!

Point your browser to localhost:5000. Login with that superuser account you created (you remember your password, right?).

7. Use that to configure Celery beat for sending out our social media posts!

Now that meow is up and running, head to localhost:5000/admin/django_celery_beat/periodictask. A bit of terminology first, though! Celery is our Python program to automatically run certain "tasks" or jobs, like sending out social media posts in this case. Celery works by calling these "tasks" every interval that you tell it to. To actually get meow to work on your local machine, you'll need to create a task so Celery has something to actually do basically.

Once you're on the "Periodic Tasks" page, click that "Add Periodic Task" button in the top right. Name that task "My Periodic Task". Below that, in the "Task (registered)" row, make sure sendposts is selected.

Below, in the "Schedule" section, we need to create an interval. Hit the plus button in the "Interval" row and add an interval for every minute. Once you create that interval, select it from the dropdown.

All other options you can leave alone! Hit that "Save" button when you're done!

8. Time to set some variables

Make your way to http://localhost:5000/admin/scheduler/meowsetting/ and go to site_url. By default, it'll probably be something like http://meow.dailybruin.com, in which case you'll want to change it to http://localhost:5000.

You'll also need to go to the Slack channel #meow-dev and look at this message (it's pinned) and use that to set the following fields:

• fb_app_secret
• fb_app_id
• twitter_consumer_secret
• twitter_consumer_key

9. Add a Section

The last thing you have to do before you can connect meow to your social media is create a section at localhost:5000/admin/scheduler/section/ Click "Add Section" in the top right, and in the "Name" row, add your name in the field.

10. Connect Social Media Accounts

Navigate to localhost:5000/manage/, and click on "Twitter/Facebook accounts". Make sure you're an admin for the Facebook page you want to connect to and click "Connect with Facebook"! Follow the steps on when you're redirected to Facebook. At the end, you will be prompted to choose a section and a page. Click on the dropdown for "Choose a section" and click on the section you created in step 9. Then click on the dropdown for "Choose a page" and click on the Facebook page you want to connect to. Once you click "Connect," you can send posts to Facebook with meow!

The next step is to connect your Twitter account to meow. Head back to localhost:5000/manage/. Ensure that you're logged in to the Twitter account you wish to post to or else you might end up posting to your personal Twitter! Click "Connect with Twitter" and then "Authorize app." When prompted to "Choose a section," select the one you created in step 9. After clicking "Connect," you can begin sending meow posts Twitter.

11. Send a Post!

At localhost:5000, you can begin sending meows. Click "New" in the top right, and fill in the fields. A slug is a relatively unique string used in the newsroom to identify stories in production (e.g., a story about cats could be called news.catattack).

Adding A Database Field

In Django, if you want to add fields to your database (postgreSQL in our case), you would add a line to a class (each of which represents a table) in models.py. Once you finish adding your attributes, you will need to re-make migrations and re-build before you use those additional attributes.

docker-compose run web meow/manage.py makemigrations
docker-compose run web meow/manage.py migrate
docker-compose --build

If you want to artificially insert rows into any of your local databases, use the following command to access the postgreSQL container.

docker ps
*c2bd3a5f4968*        postgres:latest         "docker-entrypoint..."   2 months ago        Up 3 hours          0.0.0.0:5432->5432/tcp           meow_db_1

container ID = bolded above though yours may be different (c2bd3a5f4968)

docker exec -it <container ID> psql -U postgres

Now you add rows to the database using postgreSQL commands.

License

Meow is released under GNU AGPLv3. See LICENSE for more details.

Though not required, if you use this software or would like to contribute to its development, please let us know by emailing us at [e-mail]. We'd love to know what it's being used for, especially if it's at another college newspaper.