Automat

Glue code for turning an Airtable recipe book into Todoist tasks for both daily cooking tasks, and a shopping list.

Using it

To use Automat, you'll first need to run set up the external services, and then, the code.

Set up Airtable

Setup here should be fairly simple:

• Grab the API key (https://airtable.com/account)
• Grab the base ID (https://airtable.com/api)
• Grab the table name within the base that contains the recipes

The table should have the columns:

Name	Type	Description	Use
Name	Text	The name of the recipe	Forms part of the cooking task name
Meals	Number	The number of days food the recipe will make	Used both for choosing how many recipes to choose for a time, and for how many cooking tasks to create
Ingredients	Text	A new-line delimited list of ingredients	Populates the shopping list
Source	Text	Where the recipe is from	Forms part of the cooking task name
Last cooked	Date	The last time this recipe was chosen	Recipes are more likely to be chosen when they haven't been cooked recently

Set up Todoist

Again, this should be pretty simple:

• Grab the API token (https://todoist.com/prefs/integrations)
• Create two projects, and grab their names - Its suggested, but not required that these are only used for Automat tasks
  • One for the daily cooking tasks to be put into
  • One for the shopping list

Building the code

• Download the repo
• Run npm install
• Run npm test

Configuration

There are a number of ways to configure Automat (based off Convict):

• Environment variables
• Command line arguments (e.g. --config=other-config.json)
• Config file

Property	Required	Default	Environment variable	Argument	JSON Path
Config file path	no	./config.json	CONFIG_FILE	config	N/A
Airtable API key	yes	N\A	AIRTABLE_KEY	airtable-key	airtable.apiKey
Airtable base ID	yes	N\A	AIRTABLE_BASE	airtable-base	airtable.baseId
Airtable table name	no	Recipes	AIRTABLE_TABLE	airtable-table	airtable.tableName
Todoist API key	yes	N\A	TODOIST_KEY	todoist-key	todoist.apiKey
Todoist cooking project	no	Cooking	COOKING_PROJECT	cooking-project	todoist.projects.cooking
Todoist shopping project	no	Groceries	SHOPPING_PROJECT	shopping-project	todoist.projects.shopping
Days to pick food for	no	10	AUTOMAT_DAYS	days	recipeChoice.days
Logger	no	info	LOG_LEVEL	log-level	logger.level

Example config JSON file

{
  "airtable": {
    "apiKey": "abc123",
    "baseId": "def456",
    "tableName": "Recipes"
  },
  "todoist": {
    "apiKey": "hij789",
    "projects": {
      "cooking": "Cooking",
      "shopping": "Groceries"
    }
  },
  "recipeChoice": {
    "days": 5
  }
}

Running It

Once the config has been set up, then running the code is a matter of running

`npm start`