tootbot-spicy/README.md

# TootBot Spicy Edition

A small python 3.x script to replicate tweets and posts from soup.io on a mastodon account.
It's based on TootBot: https://github.com/cquest/tootbot

The script only need mastodon login/pass to post toots.

For Twitter, it gets the tweets from RSS available at http://twitrss.me, then does some cleanup on the content:
- twitter tracking links (t.co) are dereferenced
- twitter hosted pictures are retrieved and uploaded to mastodon

For Soup, it uses the official RSS feed (e.g. https://metalab.soup.io/rss), then does some cleanup on the content:
- checks if source is twitter and checks for duplicates
- removes html stuff
- looks for one picture in source link or in soup post and uploads it to mastodon
- adds source url (if no source is specified, soup post is source url)


A sqlite database is used to keep track of items than have been tooted.


This script ist used by metalab: https://chaos.social/@metalab

## Installation

You may want to run it in a virtualenv:
* Clone this repo with git.
* Download an install virtualenv from the repository and package manager of your favor.
* Create virtualenv: `virtualenv -p python3 ~/.virtualenvs/tootbot-spicy`
* Activate your new virtualenv: `source ~/.virtualenvs/tootbot-spicy/bin/activate`
* The `(tootbot)` in the prompt is indicating which virtualenv you are currently using.
* switch into the projects directory: `cd tootbot-spicy`
* Install requirements: `pip3 install -r requirements.txt`
* copy the config-example: `cp config-example.json config.json`.
* edit `config.json`
* copy the cron-example: `cp cron-example.sh cron.sh`.
* edit `cron.sh`
* add cronjob for `cron.sh`: `crontab -e`
* if you want to quit virtualenv environment, just type `deactivate`

The script is simply called by a cron job and can run on any server (does not have to be on the mastodon instance server).