/meow

Social media poster

Primary LanguagePythonGNU Affero General Public License v3.0AGPL-3.0

Meow

Daily Bruin's Twitter and Facebook poster

Installation instructions

1. Install system packages

These instructions are meant for Ubuntu. If you are using something other than ubuntu, find the packages on your own.

With Vagrant

If you want to use Vagrant, clone this repo and vagrant up will automatically install everything in this section.

Without Vagrant

Install the required packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-pip python-setuptools python-dev fabric git postgresql postgresql-server-dev-9.1 sendmail

2. Create a virtual environment (optional)

I prefer virtualenvwrapper since virtualenv depends on symlinks and VirtualBox shared folders don't support symlinks.

Install it like this:

sudo easy_install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

And add this line to your .bashrc:

source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

Make a virtualenv:

mkvirtualenv meow

And activate the vitualenv (it does this automatically after creating it):

workon meow

To deactiveate...

deactivate

3. Install python packages

Install psycopg2 (a postgres adapter) outside of your virtualenv

easy_install psycopg2

Then within your virtualenv install everything in requirements.txt within this repo

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Configure django

Configure your database in django. For development environments, open /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf in a text editor (you may need to install something like vim) and, around line 84, change the word peer or md5 to trust like so:

# Database administrative login by Unix domain socket
local   all             postgres                                trust

# TYPE  DATABASE        USER            ADDRESS                 METHOD

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all             all                                     trust

Create a database (this makes a database with the name "meow"):

createdb -U postgres meow

Then in meow/meow/settings.py configure your database settings. If you followed these instructions, this should work:

'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
'NAME': 'meow',
'USER': 'postgres',
'PASSWORD': '',

Sync the databases through django and create your own superuser:

python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py migrate

5. Configure meow

Run python manage.py init to configure all settings.

6. Configure sections

Use the default Django admin (http://[YOUR_URL]/admin) to add a Section object. To find Twitter access keys/tokens, use the instructions at

python manage.py twitter_auth

and to find the Facebook tokens, use these instructions.

Running meow

Run meow by going into the meow directory of the repo and typing

fab rs

This will run meow on 0.0.0.0:8000 (not the default 127.0.0.1:8000) so it can be accessible from other machines. (i.e. accessing meow from a host when meow is running on a VM).

If you want to run it on a different port, the fabric command takes an argument. For instance,

fab rs:2000

will listen on port 2000.

Sending tweets

Tweets are sent through a management command. In meow/, execute:

python manage.py sendposts

This will send any posts that are marked as copy-edited and ready for publication but are not yet sent. If you want posts to send automatically, put this on a cron job.

The Daily Bruin's cron job is something like:

#! /bin/bash
source meow-venv/bin/activate
python meow/manage.py sendposts

sendposts will output the facebook post or tweet when it tries to send to stdout (in ASCII) so feel free to implement logging. Almost all sending errors, however, are saved within meow's database for easy access.


Test accounts

These are only used for testing and are set as private. When testing is over, these accounts should be deleted and removed from this page.

General

Twitter

DailyBruinTest
bruin111
online+fakedb@media.ucla.edu

Facebook

FakeDBthatCalvinCreated
Page ID: 160988910774531

Facebook

FakeDB
Page ID: 1416676115217881

A&E

Facebook

FakeDB A&E
Page ID: 1415944791959246


License

Meow is released under GNU AGPLv3. See LICENSE for more details.

Though not required, if you use this software or would like to contribute to its development, please let us know by emailing us at online@media.ucla.edu. We'd love to know what it's being used for, especially if it's at another college newspaper.