Countdown Mastobot 🐘

Mastodon bot for counting down.

Currently: counting down to May 12, 2023: the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

How to use

I went completely overboard in making what amounts to something that could be done in two lines of Python added to a crontab able to run on a full-fledged kubernetes cluster. BUT, I've made every effort to also make it usable in a crontab setup with minimal fanfare.

0: Prerequisites

You'll want to obtain developer / application keys for your bot account first. This is done through your Mastodon instance's web interface, and may depend on what your instance's policies towards bots are. In general, the botsin.space explicitly caters to the design and deployment of bots, though other instances may also be friedly to them.

Specifically, you'll want a client-key, client-secret, and access-token in order to make these scripts work.

1: Manually

By "manually", I mean invoking the Python scripts, or maybe the bash script, directly.

You'll need to make sure you have a compatible Python environment. An environment file has been provided so all you need to do is:

Install conda or mamba
Run conda create -f environment.yml

Next, edit the mastobot.sh and add your Mastodon credentials to the file (the ones you obtained in "0: Prerequisites" above).

Finally, simply run the bash script:

> ./mastobot.sh

Note: If it fails to run with a "permission denied" error, run chmod +x mastobot.sh first, then try the above command again.

2: Crontab

You'll still need to go through the process in "1: Manually" of installing and configuring the Python environment for the bot to run in, and modifying the mastobot.sh bash script to include the Mastodon credentials for your bot.

After that, you'll run crontab -e to bring up the crontab editor. If you've never used cron before, you may want to brush up using one of numerous tutorials available. Two things to consider:

Frequency. The bot is designed to run once per day, though it has provisions to ensure it doesn't happen more often than that. So a frequency of something like 0 12 * * * will run once per day at noon (this is the frequency provided in mastobot.yaml for the kubernetes configuration below).
Command. This would look something like /bin/bash /path/to/mastobot.sh (note the space in there between the bash command and the script itself).

3: Kubernetes

A full-blown kubernetes deployment is possible with the provided mastobot.yaml and mastobot-credentials.yaml specifications files.

mastobot.yaml is the CronJob, which contains information about the frequency of the job, the container image it will pull to run the job, and the environment variables associated with running the job. You can use this as-is.
mastobot-credentials.yaml is the accompanying Secret that contains the Mastodon application credentials. YOU WILL NEED TO MODIFY THIS.

Particularly of note: when you receive your Mastodon credentials, but before putting them in the Secret, you'll have to run the following command, for each of the three values:

> echo -n 'client id token in these quotes' | base64
# alonglineofcharacters==

You'll run this command three times, one for each of the three values, with the value in the single quotes. It will return another long string of random characters, each with a double equals sign at the end ==, and it's this second string of random characters (including the equals signs!) that you'll put in the mastobot-credentials.yaml file.

See this documentation for more details on the process.

Then, you'll run:

> kubectl create namespace mastobot
> kubectl apply -f mastobot-credentials.yaml
> kubectl apply -f mastobot.yaml

and you're all set!

magsol / countdown-mastobot