bostrom/glad-idag-twitter

A twitter bot for publishing the Österbottens Tidning newspaper's readers' comments to twitter.

Glad idag / arg idag Twitter bot

A Twitter bot for publishing the reader's comments a.k.a. "Glad idag / Arg idag" from the Österbottens Tidning newspaper to Twitter. The articles express the reader's satisfaction or dissatisfaction regarding anything and are not related to the newspaper in any way.

How it works

The bot scrapes one article per minute from Österbottens Tidning and publishes it to one of two different twitter accounts based on whether it expresses satisfaction (Glad idag) or dissatisfaction (Arg idag).

Since the maximum length of Twitter posts is 140 characters and the articles are often longer than that, the bot converts longer articles into images and posts the image to Twitter instead.

Getting it

git clone [email protected]:bostrom/glad-idag-twitter.git
cd glad-idag-twitter
npm install --production

Note that glad-idag-twitter uses node-canvas under the hood. For glad-idag-twitter's dependencies to install, you might have to fulfill the installation requirements for node-canvas. Please refer to their documentation for instructions.

Configuring it

The bot needs to be configured with keys for the Twitter accounts and host/port to a MongoDB database for bookkeeping. The values are read from the following environment variables:

Environment variable(s)	Required	Default value	Description
TW_GLAD_CONSUMER_KEY	Yes	""	Twitter account #1 consumer key
TW_GLAD_CONSUMER_SECRET	Yes	""	Twitter account #1 consumer secret
TW_GLAD_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY	Yes	""	Twitter account #1 access token key
TW_GLAD_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET	Yes	""	Twitter account #1 access token secret
TW_ARG_CONSUMER_KEY	Yes	""	Twitter account #2 consumer key
TW_ARG_CONSUMER_SECRET	Yes	""	Twitter account #2 consumer secret
TW_ARG_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY	Yes	""	Twitter account #2 access token key
TW_ARG_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET	Yes	""	Twitter account #2 access token secret
DB_PORT_27017_TCP_ADDR or DB_HOST	No	"db"	Database hostname
DB_PORT_27017_TCP_PORT or DB_PORT	No	27017	Database port
POLL_INTERVAL_SECONDS	No	60	New article poll interval (seconds)
DEBUG	No	false	Turns on debug mode

Running it

The bot is able to run either locally or in a Docker container.

In a Docker container

The supplied Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml provides means for the bot to run in a Docker container (actually two containers, one for the server and one for the database instance).

Make sure you have Docker installed and running on your host.

Make a copy of the environment variable configuration file config/web-variables-example.env and call it config/web-variables.env. Replace the dummy variable values, save, and run docker-compose up.

cp config/web-variables{-example,}.env
vi config/web-variables.env
docker-compose up                        # ctrl-C exits

Locally

Make sure you have a MongoDB database instance running on your host. Set the needed configuration environemnt variables and run npm start. Example:

DEBUG=1 DB_HOST=localhost npm start

If you don't want to install MongoDB on your host, you can run it in a Docker container and have your local glad-idag-twitter process connect to the container.

docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --name gladidagmongo mongo:latest    # start a mongo container
docker-machine ip default                                         # check the ip of your docker machine
DEBUG=1 DB_HOST=192.168.99.100 npm start                          # make the bot connect to the mongo container

In debug mode

Set the DEBUG environment variable to any value to turn on debug mode. Debug mode means that

• the bot doesn't actually tweet the articles.
• the the database is still updated with bookeeping information.
• the generated images (if article is longer than 140 characters) are saved in the lib folder.

Testing it

To run unit tests, install the devlopment dependencies and run npm test.

npm install         # no --production flag this time
npm test            # ctrl-C exits

A test coverage report will be generated in coverage/lcov-report/index.html.

License

ISC License (ISC)

Copyright (c) 2016, Fredrik Boström

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.