Mastodon #eqnz bot

This bot attempts to replicate for mastodon what @geonet@twitter.com and @nz_quake@twitter.com do on twitter: timely earthquake reporting. It is written in Python 3, and polls the Geonet API.

Setup

Posting to mastodon requires an account on a mastodon server (see joinmastodon.org), the Mastodon.py python module, and a usercred.secret file.

The mastodon.py module can be installed with e.g. pip install --user Mastodon.py. The secret file can most easily be generated via this python script, e.g.:

python setupclient.py eqnz "https://botsin.space" "bot@example.com"

The script will prompt for a password and, if successful, will produce eqnz_clientcred.secret and eqnz_usercred.secret files.

Running

Basic operation is e.g.:

python eqnz.py --secret eqnz_usercred.secret --mmi 3

This polls the API once every 30 seconds, for earthquakes with a Modified Mercalli Intensity of III or higher (weak and up), and posts to the mastodon account associated with the secret file.

This could probably be put into a systemd service file, but for now I leave this as an example to the user.

Volcano bot

volcano.py checks the alert level of New Zealand's volcanoes and, if they have changed, posts to mastodon. To run with a pyenv virtualenvironment and cron, I suggest a wrapper script along the lines of:

*/15 * * * * /home/petra/runvolc >> /home/petra/volclog.txt 2>&1

runvolc:

#! /bin/bash

export PATH="/home/petra/.pyenv/bin:$PATH"
export PYENV_VIRTUALENV_DISABLE_PROMPT=1
eval "$(pyenv init -)"
eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"

cd /home/petra/eqnz-mastodon
pyenv activate eqnzvenv
python volcano.py