This is a simple system I came up with for running multiple Twitter bots from my Raspberry Pi. It makes cron task scheduling a little easier, and allows you to edit your schedule remotely via GitHub, using the gitpull shell script. (You can also open your SSH port to access your Pi remotely, but this way is both automated and safer.) Note I run this on Raspbian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie).
I've also includded the code to a few of my own bots in the /bots directory, to help get you started with making bots in Node.js. Basically just use Twit.
The setup is pretty easy. Just install node.js and:
- Clone this repo to your Pi
npm install- Edit cron jobs on your Pi
$ crontab -e - Paste in the contents of pi/cron.txt
- Copy pi/gitpull.sh to /home/pi/shell/
- Make it executable with
$ chmod +x gitpull.sh - When you create a new bot, put it in a new folder in the /bots directory.
If you copy pi-bots to your own repo, you can use gitpull.sh to pull from it periodically, so that you can edit your bots remotely without opening your SSH port on your home router. All you have to do is add it to an interval in tasks.json, like:
"10mins": [
"/home/pi/shell/gitpull.sh"
],
You can run your bots the same way. For example, if you want to run a bot every two hours, you'd add the run command to that interval in tasks.json, like:
"2hours": [
"/usr/sbin/node /home/pi/pi-bots/bots/ascii_bot/app.js",
],
You can also run multiple bots at the same interval:
"2hours": [
"/usr/sbin/node /home/pi/pi-bots/bots/ascii_bot/app.js",
"/usr/sbin/node /home/pi/pi-bots/bots/hum/app.js"
],
Note you can view the most recent cron job errors/responses for each interval with, for example:
$ cat /tmp/2hourError
And you can view the cron job event log with:
$ grep CRON /var/log/syslog