panademo/bapcsredditbot

Reddit bot to track /r/buildapcsales for specific deals & ping to account with hits

BAPCSBot

A Reddit bot using Python and the PRAW Reddit API wrapper to monitor the 'new' section of /r/buildapcsales for deals and ping a Reddit account on a hit.

Goals

One of my favorite pastimes is to window shop PC parts online, and /r/buildapcsales is my main destination. Occasionally, there are really good deals posted that I end up missing from quickly going out of stock for being too good, and I wanted to catch them more often. I also wanted to pick up both Python and working with a social media API.

My goal with this bot is to ping a message to my Reddit account when certain deals are found in the new section of the subreddit. The bot is designed to continuously run on a server. In my case, I am using Cron on Ubuntu 18.04 on a Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC development board.

In the future, I would like to add a simple UI to pass in parameters to also return deals on specific types of deals and update the 'deal' method.

Status

• Correctly configure praw.ini file
• Pull newest posts and check if the have been checked
• Write basic method to determine if a post is a 'deal'
• Setup server for bot
• Fix some cases where the bot send multiple messages of same link
• Update 'deal' method
• Add UI to pass parameters for specific deals
• Add method to deal with Reddit downtime or connection failures
• Possibly add support for tracking more subreddits

Running BAPCSRobot

To start, you will need Python 3.7 and will need to install PIP and PRAW

python get-pip.py
pip install praw 

To access the Reddit API, you will need to register for access here.

In order to run the program, you will need to edit the praw.ini file for your own client ID, client secret, username, password, and user_agent. This file will be placed in the current working directory. Here is the section of praw.ini that will need to be modified:

[bot1]
client_id=reddit_client_id
client_secret=reddit_client_secret
password=bot_password
username=bot_username
user_agent=user_agent_name

You will also have to edit this line in bapcsrobot.py to add a Reddit username for the bot to PM(This is the only line that needs a Reddit username and password, so you could remove this line from the code and avoid providing a Reddit username and password, but you will still need a client ID, client secret, and user_agent):

 reddit.redditor('RedditUsernameGoesHere').message('(U) [^_^] (U)  Fresh BAPCS Deal! (U) [^_^] (U) ', submission.link)

From here, you can run the bot script as-is and it will be functional, but it will not run continuously. To set up automation, you will need a Linux distribution and a few commands (This site looks like a much easier alternative, but I found this a little too late...)

To start, you will need to install Python (at least 3.4), pip, PRAW, Git, and clone the repository to the directory of your choosing:

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install python3
sudo apt-get install python3-pip -y
sudo pip3 install praw
sudo apt-get install git -y
git clone https://github.com/azharbaig171/bapcsredditbot.git

Make the required edits to the praw.ini and bapcsrobot.py files. Next, you will have to setup Cron

crontab -e

Choose your preferred text editor, and a file will open to add a time and command. To have the program run at a certain path every minute (this is what worked for me, your commands may vary):

* * * * * cd /Documents/bapcsrobot/bapcsredditbot && /usr/bin/python3.6 bapcsrobot.py

The bot will now be running in the background. You're now done!

Links

Build a Reddit Bot

PRAW Documentation

CRONHowTo

Acknowledgements

Thanks to this blog post for a great tutorial on building a Reddit bot and automating the process!