/nhl-discord-bot

A Twitter bot that sends a tweet every time your NHL team has an important game event happen in near real time.

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

NHL Twitter Game Bot

This script parses the NHL Schedule & Live Feed API endpoints to gather rather relevant game events and tweet them to the game bot Twitter acount.

List of Tweeted Events

  • Morning of Gameday (with time, broadcast channel & hashtag)
  • On Ice Players (start of game & start of OT)
  • Start of Periods
  • End of Periods (with goals and shots)
  • Goals
    • Preferred Team gets assists & scoring changes.
  • Penalties (with power play detection)
  • End of game with post-game boxscore image generation
  • Three Stars

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites and Installation

To run this bot, download the most current release and install the requirements via pip.

git clone git@github.com:mattdonders/nhl-twitter-bot.git
cd nhl-twitter-bot
pip install -r requirements.txt
  • Create a new Twitter application and request an Access Token once completed.
  • If you want to send messages to Discord create a new Discord application and copy its token.
  • Rename secret-sample.py to secret.py and fill in the proper credentials.
    • There are two sets of Twitter credentials as the second set can be used to setup a debug / test account.
    • Linode is my cloud VPS host of choice. If you are running this locally, this can be left blank as the script will just exit on completion.
# Tweepy / Twitter API Keys
consumer_key = ''
consumer_secret = ''
access_token = ''
access_secret = ''

# Debug Tweepy / Twitter API Keys
debug_consumer_key = ''
debug_consumer_secret = ''
debug_access_token = ''
debug_access_secret = ''

# Linode Keys
linode_apikey = ''
linode_id_devils = ''

# Discord token
DISCORD_TOKEN = ''
  • Modify the following values within config.ini to fit our team and Twitter handles.
[DEFAULT]
TEAM_NAME = New Jersey Devils

[ENDPOINTS]
TWITTER_URL = https://twitter.com/NJDevilsGameBot/status/
TWITTER_HANDLE = NJDevilsGameBot
DEBUG_TWITTER_HANDLE = DevilsBotDebug

[VPS]
CLOUDHOST = linode
HOSTNAME = donders-devils-twitter

[DISCORD]
CHANNEL_ID = 12345678910

Execution

The github repository contains a shell script called startPythonScript.sh which will automatically start the Python script in the background and disown the process. Modify the GITPATH line in the script to specify the path to the cloned Github repository.

GITPATH=$HOME/python/nhl-twitter-bot

To start the bot, run the script -

$HOME/python/nhl-twitter-bot/startPythonScript.sh

I have a cron job that restarts the bot everyday at 10:00AM. You can edit your crontab file by executing the crontab -e command and pasting in the below line (again modifying the path to your script path).

0 10 * * * $HOME/python/nhl-twitter-bot/startPythonScript.sh

If you want to start the Python script from the command line and pass in debug arguments, you can execute the script directly.

/usr/bin/python3 hockey_twitter_bot.py --help
usage: hockey_twitter_bot.py [-h] [--notweets] [--console] [--team TEAM]
                             [--debugtweets] [--localdata]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --notweets     log tweets to console instead of Twitter
  --console      log to console instead of file
  --team TEAM    override team in configuration
  --debugtweets  send tweets from debug account
  --localdata    use local data instead of API
  --yesterday    get yesterday game on the schedule
  --discord      Send messages to discord channel

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

Acknowledgments