Creative bots

This is a template for making creative online bots.

A quick tutorial

Read the full tutorial on my blog. In short:

1. Choose where you want to host your bot. Note that these services require a paid subscription.

• remix this project on Glitch (pricing)
• import to Heroku (pricing)
• import to repl.it (pricing)
• download the code from GitHub and host it on your own server

2. Create accounts for all of your bots. Currently supported networks:

• Twitter
• Mastodon
• Tumblr

2. Update the .env file with your Twitter API keys/secrets.
3. All bots are automatically loaded from the bots folder. Update an existing bot, or add your own.

Each bot file needs to export an object with the following information:

{
  active: true,
  name: 'A basic bot',
  description: 'Just a very basic bot!',
  interval: cronSchedules.EVERY_THREE_HOURS,
  script: function(){
    /* This is your bot's main code. */
  }
}

You can change active to false to prevent a bot from being scheduled. For interval you can either use one of the values inside helpers/cron-schedules.js, or you can use a custom cron schedule -- see the cron package documentation for more details.

And to test your bot, uncomment the code starting on line 15 inside server.js:

const bot = require(__dirname + "/bots/random-image.js");
bot.script();

(Remember to comment it back out when you're done.)

A few more resources to get you started:

• stefans-creative-bots my own remix of this project

• The Definitive Guide to Creative Botmaking

• Botwiki for tutorials and open source bots

• the Botmakers Slack group

And be sure to submit your finished bot to Botwiki :-)

FAQ and known issues

Bots that use puppeteer stopped working.

Update puppeteer to the latest version.

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