pyvo-twitter

pyvo-twitter is a single-purpose script for announcing Pyvo meetups on Twitter, because some of can use the reminder. It draws data from pyvo-data using pyvodb.

Setting up

Setting up pyvo-twitter has been made as painless as possible. First, clone the repo and set up the virtualenv.

    git clone https://github.com/pyvec/pyvo-twitter.git
    cd pyvo-twitter
    virtualenv --python=python3 env
    source env/bin/activate
    pip install -r requirements.txt

Next, copy config.py.example to config.py.

To access the API and send automated tweets, Twitter requires having an application registered. You can either make a new one, or ask Sanqui for the official pyvo-twitter keys. Either way, fill these out in config.py.

Finally, you'll need to authenticate pyvo-twitter to tweet under the desired Twitter account. Running python pyvo-twitter.py authorize should walk you through this.

To make a test tweet after having set up, you can run

    python pyvo-twitter.py tweet-next --is-test

This will announce the date of the next Pyvo event (and note that the tweet is a test). The tweet can be deleted the standard way if you so wish.

Automatic run

If all looks well, it's time to set up automatic tweeting.

To faciliate automatic tweeting, pyvo-twitter has a tweet-today command. This command will tweet out if there is an event planned for today, otherwise, it will do nothing. (You can pass the --dry parameter to see what would be tweeted.)

You can set up the tweet-today command to run daily at a desired time (e.g., at midday) using cron. This is an example cronjob line, replacing [PATH] with the absolute path to pyvo-twitter:

    0 12 * * *  cd [PATH]/ && [PATH]/env/bin/python [PATH]/pyvo-twitter.py tweet-today

Current deployment on rosti.cz

pyvo-twitter runs on the Roští.cz server alongside pyvo.cz. It's set up in /srv/pyvo-twitter, cloned from https://github.com/pyvec/pyvo-twitter.git.

The current setup has a POSIX locale. This breaks things (see PEP 538). The virtualenv in /srv/pyvo-twitter/env/ is set up to switch to utf-8 in /src/pyvo-twitter/env/bin/activate:

    export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
    export LANG=C.UTF-8

The cron has to be set up according to rosti.cz docs on cron (which isn't too complicated).

The cron command is set up to change the locale as well, and also pull the repository.

    30 15 * * * export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8; export LANG=C.UTF-8; cd /srv/pyvo-twitter/ && ( git pull origin master --quiet; /srv/pyvo-twitter/env/bin/python /srv/pyvo-twitter/pyvo-twitter.py tweet-today )

If necessary, @Sanqui and @encukou have access.

License

pyvo-twitter is under the MIT license.