LinkShower

Simple web front end for https://github.com/daviddever/LinkGrabber (IRC bot to scrape links from a channel, store in a sqlite database)

linkshower.py is a flask application that runs the site (just basic html and css). linkgrabber.py (in https://github.com/daviddever/LinkGrabber runs the irc bot and writes the links to the database, using irc and urlextract modules.

Both services have no real functionality without the other.

Configuration

The following can be set as environmental variables

IRC_db_path location to create and access sqlite database default is ./

IRC_channel irc channel name, default is #linkgrabber

IRC_nickname name of the irc bot, default is linkgrabber

IRC_server irc server or network to connect to, default is irc.libera.chat

IRC_port irc port to use, default is 6667

Setup

The app can be setup manually or run using Docker containers

Docker

Pass the appropriate environmental variables to the containers and be sure to open allow access

for web traffic to the linkshower container and irc traffic to the linkgrabber container. Both

containers will need access to the sqlite database which can be done using a shared volume.

Both containers are based on Alpine, the linkshower container is built from

tiangolo/meinheld-gunicorn-flask using Meinheld managed by Gunicorn for running the Flask

application.

docker run -d -p 6667:6667 -e "IRC_channel=#linkgrabber" \
                           -e "IRC_nickname=grabberbot" \
                           -e "IRC_server=irc.libera.chat" \
                           -e "IRC_db_path=/db/" \
                           -v /db:/db" \
                           ghcr.io/daviddever/linkgrabber:main

docker run -d -p 80:80 -e "IRC_channel=#linkgrabber" \
                       -e "IRC_nickname=grabberbot" \
                       -e "IRC_server=irc.libera.chat" \
                       -e "IRC_db_path=/db/" \
                       -v /db:/db" \
                       ghcr.io/daviddever/linkshower:main

Docker Compose example

version: "3.7"

services:

  linkgrabber:
    image: ghcr.io/daviddever/linkgrabber:main
    container_name: link_grabber
    environment:
      - IRC_channel=#linkgrabber
      - IRC_nickname=grabberbot
      - IRC_server=irc.libera.chat
      - IRC_db_path=/db/
    volumes:
      - /db:/db
    ports:
      - "6667:6667"
    restart: unless-stopped

  linkshower:
    image: ghcr.io/daviddever/linkshower:main
    container_name: link_shower
    environment:
      - IRC_channel=#linkgrabber
      - IRC_nickname=grabberbot
      - IRC_server=irc.libera.chat
      - IRC_db_path=/db/
    volumes:
      - /db:/db
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    restart: unless-stopped

Manually

Flask has a built in web server but this should not be used outside of testing, setting up which

is beyond the of these instructions, if you just want to run the application I recommend using

the Docker containers (see above) which runs the app with Meinheld and Gunicorn.

Assuming Ubuntu 20.04

Install pip

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Setup virtualenv

pip3 install virtualenv
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Set environmental variables (options can be passed to the app as environmental variables detailed above but

an additional environmental variable needs to be set for Flask)

export FLASK_APP=linkshower.py

export IRC_channel=#linkgrabber

Start the application

Be sure that both applications have access to the datbase location

flask run

Start LinkGrabber