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).