Daily Bruin's Twitter and Facebook poster
We've switched over to a Procfile (Heroku/Flynn/Dokku) based system for configuring and deploying our system! In most scenarios, a git push <server-remote> master will be sufficient to deploy the service. We've also paired this with a newer, leaner and hopefully easier way to develop meow using a Docker Compose based workflow. Should our compute needs and resources grow in the future, we could also switch to a complete Docker deploy pipeline.
There are some additional commands required for Windows users that will be mentioned in the comments.
git clone https://github.com/daily-bruin/meow.git - clones the repo
cd meow - enter the directory
echo "REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379/\nDATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres@db:5432/postgres" > .env - bare minimum ENV variables, ensure that the newline character is implemented in the .env file
dos2unix .env - for WINDOWS users only, ensures that .env file will on run on Linux
docker-compose build - builds and pulls the relevant Docker images
docker-compose run web meow/manage.py migrate - run the migrations
dos2unix entrypoint-dev.sh - for WINDOWS users only
find ./ -type f -exec dos2unix {} \; - for WINDOWS users only
docker-compose run web meow/manage.py init - initialize some of the runtime config necessary for meow to run
Most of these can be left blank for now. You can create your own Twitter/Facebook apps for this, or ask one of the PMs/editors for the keys to some test accounts.
docker-compose run web meow/manage.py createsuperuser
winpty ./manage.py createsuperuser - for WINDOWS users only
Navigate to 0.0.0.0:5000/admin/django_celery_beat/periodictask/. Login with your created superuser and create a periodic task
to send out the posts!
These instructions are meant for Ubuntu. If you are using something other than ubuntu, find the packages on your own.
If you want to use Vagrant, clone this repo and vagrant up will automatically install everything in this section.
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
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
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
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
reload the database:
/etc/init.d/postgresql reload
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
Run python manage.py init to configure all settings.
For this part of the set up you will need
twitter consumer key and consumer secret: https://apps.twitter.com/app/new
additionally for twitter, you will need to fill in the Callback URL
facebook app ID and app secret: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/register
bitly access token: https://bitly.com/a/oauth_apps
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.
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.
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.
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.
DailyBruinTest
bruin111
online+fakedb@media.ucla.edu
FakeDBthatCalvinCreated
Page ID: 160988910774531
FakeDB
Page ID: 1416676115217881
FakeDB A&E
Page ID: 1415944791959246
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.