Reddit To Wordcloud

This tool will turn a Reddit thread into a wordcloud.

This project relies heavily on the word cloud generator Python module written by Andreas Mueller.

Getting Started

Prerequisites You must have Python 3.6 installed on your system.

Clone this repository with git clone git@github.com:jamiebrynes7/reddit-to-wordcloud.git
Create a virtual environment in ./venv/ (you can name this something else but will need to edit the make file if you so wish)
Install the Python requirements with pip install -r requirements.txt
(Optional) If you are going to be using AWS Lambda you should run the /src/setup_dynamo.py script which will create the tables needed for the operation of the Lambda functions.

Getting a Reddit API Key

Go to https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps to register for an API key.
Select script as the type and enter a name and description and a redirect uri (localhost works fine for this).
Copy the client id and export it as an environment variable export REDDIT_CLIENT_ID="..."
Copy the secret and export it as an environment variable export REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET="..."

Running the CLI Tool

The CLI tool can be ran with python reddit2wordcloud.py --url=reddit_url --output=wordcloud.png. You can optionally include a --config argument with a path to a JSON configuration file for the word cloud. An example of this config file can be found here.

AWS Lambda

Included in this repository is three Python scripts that can be used for AWS Lambda (serverless execution) of the script. The reason there are three is because of the Amazon's API Gateway timeout limits on requests. If you pass in a particularly large thread to the program, it will exceed this time limit, so the process was split into three. There are 2 user facing functions: one for kicking off the execution (front-end) and one for polling for success (polling). The third is the meat of the system and is not meant to be user facing.

Building the AWS Lambda Package