Reddit NPT bot

This is a Python script intended to be run once every Thursday at 11 am EDT. I plan to use the bot to make a post on the /r/mylittlepony subreddit entitled "Pony stuff you want to talk about but isn’t worthy of a dedicated thread!" This kind of thread was originally started by /u/QABJAB, then later taken over by /u/Trerrysaur and has become somewhat of a tradition on the subreddit on "No Pics Thursday" (NPT).

In general, most posts on /r/mylittlepony tend to be images of fan art. On Thursdays, in order to encourage more discussion-style posts, the moderators of /r/mylittlepony have decided to ban image posts, hence the name "No Pics Thursday" or "NPT" for short.

Technical implementation

The code that interacts with the Reddit API to submit the post lives in reddit-npt-bot.py. The script reads which number thread we are on from the num.txt file on the disk (e.g. if we are on the 153rd iteration of the thread, then num.txt should just contain 153), as well as the url of the previous thread from the prev_thread.txt url on the disk. It also reads quotes.json, from which it pulls a quote from the show to include in the text post which it then submits. I created a subreddit at /r/NPTtest in order to test this script.

All the Python script does is submit the post to Reddit. The actual scheduling of the post should be done on the server side via cron on either Linux or Mac. The crontab should look something like this:

0 15 * * 4 cd /home/USERRNAME/reddit-npt-bot; /usr/bin/python3 reddit-npt-bot.py

Under ideal conditions, this should run the Python script to submit the Reddit post at 15:00 UTC every Thursday (i.e. 11:00 am EDT). It assumes that this git repository is cloned to your home repository. Additionally, the reddit-npt-bot directory must also include a praw.ini file that includes login credentials. For more information on how to fill out the praw.ini file, see PRAW documentation.

Step-by-step setup instructions

You have to be using either Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) or Mac.

1. Install Python 3.7 or later if you don't have it
2. Install pip if you don't have it
3. Install PRAW using pip: pip install praw
4. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/SmolderTheDragon/reddit-npt-bot.git
5. Add a praw.ini file to the repository folder with your credentials. See PRAW documentation for more info.
6. Ensure that num.txt and prev_thread.txt accurately reflect what the next thread number and previous thread URL should be.
7. Cron should be pre-installed if you're on Mac or Linux. Start up Cron by running sudo systemctl enable cron in your terminal.
8. Set up a crontab by running crontab -e. See the "Technical implementation" section above for an example of what the crontab should look like. This will schedule the Python script to be run every Thursday at 11:00 am EDT.

I also found it helpful to install postfix using the "local" installation option (on Linux: sudo apt install postfix). If for some reason the Python script throws an error that isn't logged, you can find the system print-out from Cron at /var/mail/<username>.