Installation | Usage | Configuration | Example | Contributing

Inventor Bot

A fedi bot for posts in the format of 'I can't believe __ invented __'.

Installation

Inventor Bot can be installed from crates.io or manually installed from GitHub.

Crates.io

Assuming you already have the rust toolchain installed, you can simply install Inventor Bot by running

cargo install inventor_bot

Nix

You can also build Inventor Bot using Nix flakes;

nix build github:KaitlynEthylia/InventorBot

Usage

Running the command inventor_bot will start the bot, but it will be unable to run until you provide it with a configuration file. A few command line arguments are provided to modify how the bot runs:

-c, --config <FILE>: Override the default config file path.

--cache <DIR>: Override the default cache directory path, ignoring any value set in the config. <br/ >

-l, --log <LEVEL>: Set the minimum level of logs to print. Valid values are 'debug', 'info', 'warn', 'error', and 'off'.

-t, --token <TOKEN>: The authorisation token for the bot to use. This will override whatever is in the cache unless --no-cache is also passed. The token must have write:statuses permissions.

-n, --no-cache: Disables caching, meaning that no authorisation tokens will be stored. Useful if passing a token via the --token argument, and you don't want it to override the currently stored token.

Configuration

By default, Inventor Bot will look for configuration in the following places:

Platform	Location
Linux	$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/inventor_bot.toml
Windows	%APPDATA%\inventor_bot.toml
MacOS	$HOME/Library/Application Suport/inventor_bot.toml

The config is relatively small, with only a few important options:

Option	Type	Description
inventors	List of strings	Possible people to fill in the first blank in "I can't believe ___ invented ___".
instance	String	The Fedi instance to post to
repeat	Null or Integer	The delay between repeated postings in minutes. Null (i.e. Omitting the option) means that the bot will make a post and then the application will exit.
visibility	"public" or "unlisted"	The visibility of the posts made to fedi.

Caching

To prevent you from having to log in every time you start the bot, It's possible to cache the authorisation token you generate when logging in. The following options are available for caching:

Option	Type	Description
cache.enable	Boolean	Whether to enable caching, off by default.
cache.path	String	The path to store the cache at. This should be a directory. The default value on linux is $XDG_CACHE_HOME/inventor_bot/
cache.protect	Boolean	Whether to encrypt the cache with a password. If caching is enabled and this is not, a warning will be printed whenever you start the bot.

Advanced Options

These options are not particularly useful to most people, but exist anyways:

Option	Type	Description
dry_run	Boolean	When enabled, the bot will never actually post, and print to the terminal instead. This exists mostly to help with debugging.
port	Integer	The port to listen on whilst waiting for authorisation
lang	String	The language to request the authorisation page be displayed in. Currently this has no effect on the output of the bot. If I can be bothered, I might change this.
client	String	The name of the client to register the bot under to the fedi instance

Example

An example config may look something like this:

instance = "tech.lgbt"
repeat = 360

inventors = [
	"Hatsune Miku",
	"Hatsune Miku",
	"Hatsune Miku",
	"Yassie",
	"Yassie",
	"Kasane Teto",
	"Inventor Bot",
	"your mum",
	"Luna",
	"jerma985",
	"the media",
]

[cache]
enable = true
protect = true

Contributing

Like.. just open a PR or something, idk...