When you're just running in an IPython Notebook, your Twitter bot can only post when you hit Play. That's no fun, right?
Luckily, we can figure out a way around that. Your server has something called cron on it that lets you run Python scripts at specific intervals (every 10 minutes, every day at 12:03, once a week, etc). Let's figure out how it works!
IPython Notebooks (.ipynb files) can't be run from the command line, only a Python script can be (.py file). The first thing you'll need to do is export your notebook into a Python file. We haven't used raw Python files very much, but if you remember when we made our baby Quakebot that was a simple .py file.
To export: Open up your notebook and Do File > Download As > Python (.py).
You'll get a .py file sitting in your Downloads directory. Open it up, if you'd like - all of the markdown etc has been converted into comments!
That file isn't going to do you very much good sitting on your own computer, you need to move it on up to your server. scp it to ~/, using syntax along the lines of
scp -i /path/to/key weatherbot.py admin@0.0.0.0:~/
with weatherbot.py being your file, 0.0.0.0 being your server's IP, and /path/to/key being your pem file. It'll copy it into your home directory on the server. I'm going to pretend your filename is weatherbot.py for the rest of the instructions, so don't get mixed up!
If your filename has spaces in it, get rid of them! They tend to cause a lot of problems, try underscores or hyphens instead.
ssh into your server, and try to run the script with
python weatherbot.py
It probably won't print anything, but if you check your Twitter account it should have posted a new tweet! If you get an error about a duplicate tweet, check your IPython notebook and make sure you don't have any
api.update_status("Testing")
kinds of lines that would always print the same content. If you do, erase the cell, re-download the .py, re-upload it to your server, and try to run it again.
Now it's time to use cron to make the script run every 10 minutes (or half hour, or whatever). Every task you give cron to run every once in a while is called a cron job, and you currently have one cron job - Charles set up your server to restart your ipython notebooks when the server is restarted.
Run crontab -e from the command line on the server to edit your cron lists. It should open up a big ol' file in nano full of comments - you'll want to move down to the bottom and make a new line that says...
*/30 * * * * python ~/weatherbot.py
With your filename, of course. Ctrl+X and Enter to exit, and you'll be on your way.
That particular line will run the weather bot every thirty minutes - */5 would be every five minutes, */10 every ten, etc. 30 * * * * would make it run on the :30 of every hour (8:30, 9:30, 10:30), and 5 * * * * would make it run on the :05 of every hour (11:05, 12:05, 1:05).
Want to run something once a day at noon, or every Monday at 3:03pm? Check out Wikipedia's documentation on cron, I find it way more readable than most anything else.