The R {botmaker}

The {botmaker} helps with the configuration settings for deploying an R-based bot that automatically runs on GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions allows us to freely run R scripts on the cloud. The {botmaker} takes care of most of the configuration steps to get your R script running periodically.

The interface of the {botmaker} is intended to be similar to the {usethis} package. You open the R package in RStudio and call botmaker::make_bot.

What You Need?

You need to have an R Package project (as created with RStudio) hosted in a GitHub repository.

Also, if you wish the {botmaker} to upload needed environment variables as GitHub Secrets, then you will need to have your GitHub personal access token (PAT) at hand -also known as github_pat-.

Installation

You can install the development version of {botmaker} from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("jcrodriguez1989/botmaker")

Example

Suppose we are using the {botmaker} to set the @RStatsJobsBot Twitter bot, which runs every 15 minutes. Open the RStatsJobsBot R package in RStudio, and define the script that should be executed on every bot run:

# This code is an example, it should be the code you want to run periodically.
bot_code <- '
library("RStatsJobsBot")
run_rstatsjobsbot(
  rtweet_app = Sys.getenv("RTWEET_APP"),
  rtweet_consumer_key = Sys.getenv("RTWEET_CONSUMER_KEY"),
  rtweet_consumer_secret = Sys.getenv("RTWEET_CONSUMER_SECRET"),
  rtweet_access_token = Sys.getenv("RTWEET_ACCESS_TOKEN"),
  rtweet_access_secret = Sys.getenv("RTWEET_ACCESS_SECRET"),
  from_time = Sys.time() - 60 * 60,
  max_hashtags = 15
)
'

If the bot needs to use environment variables (Twitter bots do), we need to inform this to the make_bot function. These environment variables should be present at the GitHub repository as Secrets. To inform about the environment variables to make_bot, we should create a list with these variables:

env_vars <- list(
  RTWEET_APP = "",
  RTWEET_CONSUMER_KEY = "",
  RTWEET_CONSUMER_SECRET = "",
  RTWEET_ACCESS_TOKEN = "",
  RTWEET_ACCESS_SECRET = ""
)

If we want the {botmaker} to automatically push these Secrets to GitHub, we can provide these values to make_bot:

env_vars <- list(
  RTWEET_APP = "RStatsJobsBot_twitter_app",
  RTWEET_CONSUMER_KEY = "myconsumerkey",
  RTWEET_CONSUMER_SECRET = "myconsumersecret",
  RTWEET_ACCESS_TOKEN = "myaccesstoken",
  RTWEET_ACCESS_SECRET = "myaccesssecret"
)

And let the {botmaker} create the configuration files by executing:

botmaker::make_bot(
  bot_code,
  cron_schedule = botmaker::cron_run_every(minutes = 15),
  env_vars = env_vars,
  repo = "jcrodriguez1989/RStatsJobsBot"
)

And finally, push the generated files to the GitHub repository.