Larry 🐦

Larry is a Golang cli bot that tweets random Github repositories.

Disclaimer

I hold no liability for what you do with this bot or what happens to you by using this bot. Abusing this bot can get you banned from Twitter, so make sure to read up on proper usage of the Twitter API.

Running bots

• GolangRepos: Tweets repositories from Github that contain the "golang" topic
• RustRepos: Tweets repositories from Github that contain the "rust" topic
• MLRepositories: Tweets repositories from Github that contain the "machine-learning" topic
• CryptoRepos: Tweets repositories from Github that contain the "crypto" topic

Installation

You can install Larry by cloning the repo and using go install

git clone https://github.com/ezeoleaf/larry.git
cd larry/cmd/larry
go install

You can also use make for building the project and generating an executable:

git clone https://github.com/ezeoleaf/larry.git
cd larry
make build

Or you can just run it on the go

git clone https://github.com/ezeoleaf/larry.git
cd larry
go run . [options]

Usage

Configuring the bot

Before running the bot, you must first set it up so it can connect to Github and Twitter API.

To do this, you will need to setup the following environment variables:

- GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN
- TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
- TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
- TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN
- TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET

If you want the content to be publish in a README file on a repo, you also need these variables
- GITHUB_PUBLISH_REPO_OWNER (Your Github username)
- GITHUB_PUBLISH_REPO_NAME (The name of the repo where your README is. It has to be public)
- GITHUB_PUBLISH_REPO_FILE (By default is README)

For generating Github access token you can follow this guide

For getting Twitter keys and secrets you can follow this guide

Note: You will have to generate both consumer and access pair of keys/tokens and secrets.

Providers and Publishers

For information on publishers and providers click here

Providers (where the information is coming from)

Name	Key	Environment Variables
Github	github	GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN

NOTE: The key is used in the --provider or --pr option

Publishers (where the information is going to be posted)

Name	Key	Environment Variables	Observation
Twitter	twitter	TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET
Github	github	GITHUB_PUBLISH_REPO_OWNER GITHUB_PUBLISH_REPO_NAME GITHUB_PUBLISH_REPO_FILE	For now it is only going to be posted in the README file and the repository must be public

NOTE: The key is used in the --publisher or --pub option

Running the bot

To run the bot, you have two ways.

If you have installed the bot, you can run it using larry [options]

If you want to run it without installing it globally you can use go run . [options]

Example:

larry -h

As a response you will see the entire options available

NAME:
   Larry - Bot that publishes information from providers to different publishers

USAGE:
   larry [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

AUTHORS:
   @ezeoleaf <[email protected]>
   @beesaferoot <[email protected]>
   @shubhcoder
   @kannav02
   @siddhant-k-code <[email protected]>
   @savagedev

COMMANDS:
   help, h  Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --topic value, -t value          topic for searching repos
   --lang value, -l value           language for searching repos
   --time value, -x value           periodicity of tweet in minutes (default: 15)
   --cache value, -r value          size of cache for no repeating repositories (default: 50)
   --hashtag value, --ht value      list of comma separated hashtags
   --tweet-language, --tl           bool for allowing twetting the language of the repo (default: false)
   --safe-mode, --sf                bool for safe mode. If safe mode is enabled, no repository is published (default: false)
   --provider value, --pr value     provider where publishable content comes from (default: "github")
   --publisher value, --pub value   list of comma separated publishers (default: "twitter")
   --content-file value, --cf value file containing content to publish
   --skip-csv-header, --sh          bool to skip CSV file header. If true, then first record of CSV file is skipped (default: false)
   --blacklist value, --bl value    optional file containing blacklisted repository Ids
   --help, -h                       show help (default: false)

For running the bot, the command will depend on whatever you want to tweet, but, for tweeting about React repositories every 30 minutes, you could use

  larry --topic react --time 30 --safe-mode

For running the bot for Rust tweets every 15 minutes

  larry --lang rust --time 15

For running the bot for Golang every 15 minutes and specifying a blacklist file named blacklist.txt

  larry --topic golang --time 15 --blacklist ./blacklist.txt

For running the bot every 60 minutes using the "contentfile" provider and JSON file for content

  larry --time 60 --provider contentfile --content-file ./content.json

For running the bot every 60 minutes using the "contentfile" provider to read CSV file for content and skipping the header record

  larry --time 60 --provider contentfile --content-file ./content.csv --skip-csv-header

Content Files

The contentfile provider serves content from CSV and JSON files.

JSON Content File

When the contentfile provider receives a content-file filename with a .json extension, the provider serves random content from the JSON file. This file consists of an array of objects in the following format. ExtraData is an array of strings.

[{
	"Title": "larry",
	"Subtitle": "Larry 🐦 is a bot generator that publishes random content from different providers built in Go",
	"URL": "github.com/ezeoleaf/larry",
	"ExtraData": ["68", "ezeoleaf", "golang"]
}]

CSV Content File

When the contentfile provider receives a content-file filename with a .csv extension, the provider serves random content from the CSV file. Each field may or may not be enclosed in double quotes. The ExtraData strings start at field 4 of the record and a record can contain any number of elements.

The following file has one record with three ExtraData strings.

The title,The subtitle,URL,ExtraString1,"ExtraString2,has comma",ExtraString3

An example CSV file with a header record followed by one record:

Title,Subtitle,URL,Stars,Author,Language,ExtraData1,ExtraData2,ExtraData3
larry,Larry 🐦 is a bot generator that publishes random content from different providers built in Go,github.com/ezeoleaf/larry,68,ezeoleaf,golang

Note: Every record in the CSV file, including the header record, must have the same number of fields otherwise an error will occur. This means if the records will have a variable number of ExtraData fields, each record having fewer than the maximum ExtraData fields must include empty ExtraData fields to match the maximum.

Blacklist File

Github Provider

For the github provider, the optional blacklist file consists of numeric GitHub repository IDs to exclude from the publishing process. These IDs can be found on the GitHub repository page source in the meta tag octolytics-dimension-repository_id.

An example blacklist file containing GitHub repository IDs. The file can contain comments using the # character, everything on the line after this character is ignored.

# Blacklisted repositories
123 # description of the respository
456

Contentfile Provider

For the contentfile provider, the optional blacklist file consists of content titles to exclude from the publishing process.

Have questions? Need help with the bot?

If you're having issues with or have questions about the bot, file an issue in this repository so anyone can get back to you.

Or feel free to contact me [email protected] :)

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