Sumerian bot

An educational Mastodon bot that posts one Sumerian cuneiform a day.

How to use it?

To post a status, run this command:

npm run post

How to install and configure?

Clone, and install the dependencies:

npm install

You will need an access token to post. Go to your Mastodon instance, log in and edit your profile. Go to Development and click on the New application button. Fill in the Application name field (e.g. Mastodon bot). At the very least, write should be checked under Scopes. Click on the Submit button at the bottom of the page.

Open the newly created application, the access token is available for you to copy.

Running the bot locally

To run the script locally, you need to create a .env file with your Mastodon instance and access token:

MASTODON_SERVER='https://example.com'
MASTODON_TOKEN='MASTODONK3Y'

Then call the command npm run post whenever you want to post something.

Running automatically with Github Actions

If you host your fork on Github, you can use Github Actions to post something on a schedule.

First, you need to configure Github Secrets with the Mastodon instance and access token. In Github, go to Settings > Security > Secrets and variables > Actions. Create New repository secret.

For the Mastodon instance your account will post to, type MASTODON_SERVER in Name and the URL in the Secret field. Click Add secret.

Create another secret for you access token. The name must be MASTODON_TOKEN. Paste your token in Secret. Add.

By default, the cron will run everyday at 10.10am UTC. It's good to avoid peak cron times such as the beginning of hours. To change the time, edit line 6 of .github/workflows/post.yml.

Note that you can also execute the command from the Actions tab on Github.

Warning

• The schedule event can be delayed during periods of high loads of GitHub Actions workflow runs. If the load is sufficiently high enough, some queued jobs may be dropped.
• In a public repository, scheduled workflows are automatically disabled when no repository activity has occurred in 60 days. To enable a disabled workflow, see Disabling and enabling a workflow.

Technical notes

The image attached is generated from a SVG rasterised to avif. I found this method easier to control the size of the image and the position of the glyph than with node-canvas.

Because the rasterisation is done with sharp, the image is never written to disc, but stays in memory. It is passed as a blob directly to masto.js for posting.

The status and image are predictably (i.e. not randomly) created based on the day.