dvar-torah

An api that generate every week Dvar Torah to the corrent week and print it to my printer

Background

Every Friday I usually print a Dvar Torah for the Shabbat table. I have noticed that the action I perform is constant and every time I take from the same site, only the parameter that changes is the Parasha of the week. So I decided I would just make a program that would do it every Friday in my place :)

Output example

How it works?

1) Get the current Parasha:

First of all, I need to get the name of the current Parsha of the week to move into the next step. For this function I use Hebcal API that will bring to me the current Parasha. The link to their Shabbat API is - https://www.hebcal.com/shabbat?cfg=json

2) Get the url of the Dvar Torah site:

After I got the Parasha, I need to get the url of the Dvar Torah.
The site that I chose to get Dvars Torah is http://www.kaduri.net/.
Due to their links generator is completely random and their internal website search is not working well - the best solution that I had to get the url of the current Parasha is by doing a Google search.
So I use Serpstack API to get Google search results by custom search.
My goal was to make sure that the first result in that search will bring to me the url that I want So I did some searches to see what brings me always my goal. The search query that I decided to is following this path:
דבר תורה קצר לשולחן השבת, פרשת ${parasha.hebrew.replace('פרשת ','')} - כדורי.נט site:http://www.kaduri.net/
I added site:http://www.kaduri.net/ to make sure that the all results will be only from my target site.

3) Get the HTML Dvar Torah page:

When I have my target url I just need to get the HTML of the page to start retrieve information from the page.

4) Make a new HTML page that contains the Dvar Torah text only:

This part contains 2 steps to get the final result:

1. First I need to make an object that will contains Vorts only which are in the site. For that step I analyzed the page to see how they built the HTML and what tags they used. After, I wrote a function that will take the text that I want by using jQuery, and build an object from that.
2. Then, I wrote a function that get this object and make a new custom HTML page that paste the text in the places that I want with some style for good looking printing.

5) Convert to PDF and send for printing:

Becuase can't print an HTML page via email I needed to convert my custom HTML to PDF file.
For that action I used an PDF converter API - https://api.html2pdf.app/v1/generate which returns me a PDF file by POSTing an HTML file.
After I get the PDF file I send it to my printer email.

5) Scheduling hours for printing:

My problem was that I deployed my program to Heroku and my free account have a lot of limits.
One of the limit was that my program will shut down if there won't be any opertion, and my opertion is launched only once a week.
So the solution that I chose is to make my program to an API which every time get a request, it sending an email to my printer for printing.
I use a webhook that sends every week at Friday 13:00 a request to my API.
The webhook site that I use is https://pipedream.com/.
The cron Expression is 00 13 * * FRI

Features

• Users can decide how many Vorts they want in the page just by writing in the api url the Vorts number.
• The Vorts are sorted.
• There is a check if the Dvar Torah is not too long, for a case that the API got a wrong page and could print a lot of papers for nothing.
• There is a seperated route that give the option to see a pewview of the Dvar Torah that the API is going to print before printing.

Contributor

Elkana Hendler - ELK4N4