A Mastodon bot (https://botsin.space/@explosmbot) that prints randomly-generated comics (http://explosm.net/rcg)
This was originally a Twitter bot, but because Twitter doesn't care about its users, they're starting to add a paywall for their API starting February 9th. Because I don't want to pay to run a little side project, I moved to a Mastodon instance specifically made to host bots. Feel free to follow the bot and add it to your timeline!
To get started, create a Mastodon account in your instance of choice. I used botsin.space as mentioned above. Then go into Preferences > Profile and make sure that "This is a bot account" is checked.
Go into Development and click on the New application button. Create a name for your bot and make sure it has at least the following scopes: read write write:media write:statuses follow. It should now generate an access token. Store this in a safe place, and DO NOT SHARE IT WITH ANYONE.
Now, clone this repo somewhere on your machine, then create the following environment variables: (you can use an .env file if you want, but be sure to uncomment a few lines at the bottom of the main Python file)
MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN=<your access token>
MASTODON_URL=<instance URL>
As for dependencies, they are all handled by Poetry. Install Poetry on your machine if you haven't already, then simply run poetry install in the project directory.
To run the bot, activate the virtual environment created by Poetry using poetry shell and run python bot.py in the project directory.
You can also run this bot as a Docker container. To do this, first create an .env file with all of the environment variables listed above. Then, if it hasn't been created already, create a requirements.txt file by running poetry export -f requirements.txt --output requirements.txt --without-hashes.
Finally, run the following Docker commands:
docker build . -t explosm-bot
docker run --env-file .env explosm-bot
This will create a container named explosm-bot that will run your Mastodon bot!
An alternative way to run your bot without explicitly activating the virtual environment is by running poetry run python bot.py. If you're running the bot on VSCode or a Python IDE, the virtual environment may be activated automatically.