FanBot

A twitter bot to compliment people and make them feel happy.

Features

• Randomly tweets a random compliment from compliments.txt at your target
• Can be asked for an immediate compliment
• Includes lock.py for autorestarting upon server restart

Future Features

• Posse mode? Retweet with hype!
• Learns from target's tweets?
• Target can tell bot how frequently to post?
• Console mode for debugging?
• Command line arg for printing tweets instead of tweeting to API for debugging.
• Quick install tool? I'm not sure if the install process is too long or not.

Installation and Operation

Installation should go pretty quickly.

1. Clone this repository - git clone https://github.com/rpalo/fanbot.git && cd fanbot
2. (Optional) Create a virtual environment for the application - python3 -m venv .venv If you name it .venv, the .gitignore file will ignore it by default.
3. (Required only if you did step 2) Activate your virtual environment

• Windows PowerShell: .venv/scripts/activate
• *nix: source .venv/bin/activate

4. Install the required packages - pip3 install -r requirements.txt
5. Create your secrets file - mv fanbot/secrets.sample.py fanbot/secrets.py
6. Create a twitter account for your bot.
7. While logged in as this bot, create a twitter app for your bot.
8. From the "Keys and Access Tokens" tab of your new app, create a new key.
9. Take note of your Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, and Access Token Secret.
10. Fill these values into your secrets.py file. Also fill in the username of the account you wish to be a fan of.
11. Fill out the main.py file with instructions of your own. Take note of Twitter's rate limiting policy. See the schedule module documentation for more info.
12. Run the tests to make sure everything's working right. In the main folder, simply type pytest. (As is evident, this uses Pytest. If you prefer nose or another testing tool, you might have to do some tweedling before you can test. Or maybe not. Not sure.)
13. Let 'er rip! python3 main.py
14. (Optional) Set up your bot as a service so it will run on a remote server and have output logs and you can leave it alone the "right way".

Setting Up as a Service

Included in the main folder is a file fanbot.service.

1. You'll need to edit this folder to include the absolute path to your python executable and your main.py file. You can also include any command-line arguments.
2. Once you've got your service file ready, copy it to /lib/systemd/system:

   sudo cp fanbot.service /lib/systemd/system/fanbot.service

3. It needs permissions of 644 to work:

   sudo chmod 644 /lib/sytemd/system/fanbot.service

4. Then referesh systemd to make sure it's managing your service:

   $ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   $ sudo systemctl enable fanbot.service

5. Make sure everything works properly:

   $ sudo reboot
   ...
   $ sudo systemctl status fanbot.service
   # You should see something good like "active" with a few startup logs.

6. (Optional) To run the service from inside your virtual environment, simply point the python executable to the one in your .venv folder (i.e. /home/{{ you }}/fanbot/.venv/bin/python). The rest will work as expected.

Once this whole process is complete, you can check the logs on your bot via:

$ sudo journalctl -e -u fanbot.service
# -e scrolls you to the end of the logs
# -u fanbot.service specifies which service to view.
# You can also use -f or --follow to watch the logs come through live (like `tail`)

Customization

If you've gotten this far, hopefully you are comfortable editing files etc. All of the randomized compliments are kept in compliments.py. You can modify the start-up/shut-down messages in fanbot.py. Please please please don't check your actual secrets.py into your repository without encryption.

Contributions

I've never really had anybody contribute to any of my projects before, but I'm super open to it. I would almost say it might be a good idea to lay out a rough skeleton of your changes and open the pull request up front so we can talk about it before you do a bunch of work.

Code of Conduct

I don't think I'll need this, but it can't hurt. Obviously the code of conduct comes down to the "Don't Be a Fartknuckle" System™. To get a good feel for what it means to Not Be a Fartknuckle, check out the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. If you have any problems, don't hesitate to let me know. If I give you problems, ditto, but additionally make sure you call me a Fartknuckle.