sportswarnbot

This is a Mastodon Bot for Non-Sport-Fans that warns its followers about upcoming matches of sports teams -- and the onslaught of the associated fan base.

Currently, it only supports upcoming matches of Borussia Dortmund by scraping bvb.de. It is planned to use openligadb.de as a data source to make it easier to fork your own bot.

• Für BVB-Warnungen folge @bvbwarnbot@botsin.space: https://botsin.space/@bvbwarnbot

Dependencies

• Python 3.8 or higher (3.5 works too, but urllib seems to be a tad unreliable there)
• Python modules:
  • BeautifulSoup4
  • tidylib
  • Mastodon
• Cron
• internet connection
• running on a linux box that runs 24/7

Install

$ git clone https://github.com/orithena/sportswarnbot.git

Configure

$ cp config_clean.py config.py
$ $EDITOR config.py

The main point is the Mastodon API key and OAuth secret -- here's how to obtain one:

• Create a new account on botsin.space, maybe "hsvwarnbot".
• Do not forget to confirm the email address.
• Run get_api_token.py, enter email address and password.
• Tokens are now stored in the files configured in config.py

Develop

Copy bvb.py to another file, maybe hsv.py, then edit it according to your needs. You need to rewrite the data fetching function fetch_data() to match the website of the sports club in your vicinity. Luckily, there's soupselect included which gives you almost jQuery-like powers when it comes to selecting elements from a HTML DOM.

To test the output of your new fetch_data() function, just run your new python script. It should output the correct data, unless you removed its main function.

When you're done, put the program into your crontab:

$ crontab -e
55 * * * * /path/to/sportswarnbot/warnbot.py | logger -t hsvwarnbot

This will call the bot every hour at xx:55 and log all output into /var/log/syslog.

If you re-publish the bot to github, MAKE SURE YOU NEVER PUBLISH THE MASTODON API KEY DATA! Simply never add any of the secrets files to git..