reddit-bot

Reddit bot in PHP CodeIgniter 4

Description

RedditBot provides PHP automation tools for Reddit, in CodeIgniter 4.

Requirements

RedditBot is built on version 4 of the CodeIgniter PHP framework. You will need to be sure your environment meets all the system requirements. Framework requirements may change but here is a good start:

• PHP 7.4 or newer
• PHP extensions (php -m): intl, json, mbstring, mysqlnd, xml, curl
• A database with one of the framework's supported drivers (default: SQLite3)

Framework requirements may depend on your choice of web host. See "Hosting with ..." in the CodeIgniter User Guide.

These are additional requirements specific to this project:

• Composer
• Access to credentials for Reddit

Installation

1. Clone or download the repo
2. Rename env to .env and fill credentials (see below)
3. Install the framework, modules, and dependencies: composer install
4. Migrate the database: php spark migrate -all
5. Seed the database: php spark db:seed InitialSeeder

Credentials

The bot requires valid Reddit application credentials. For more details read the Reddit OAuth2 wiki.

1. Login to Reddit and visit the "authorized applications" page (https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps/)
2. Under "developed applications" select "create an app..."
3. Select "script" as the application type
4. Provide a name, description, and URLs in the required text fields
5. Select "create app"

Once your application is created you will need to copy the "client ID" and "secret" (see the wiki article above for help). Add these along with your username and password into your project's .env file, for example:

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
# REDDIT API
#--------------------------------------------------------------------

reddit.clientId = as98-asdn3h93r
reddit.clientSecret = LKhsa-ASJDn9a8sdion_laskdn0
reddit.username = MyFiRsTrEdItTbOt
reddit.password = ReallySecurePassword321

If you want to use any of these optional extensions you will need to supply their configuration in .env as well:

1. Email: Fill in the Email section with the specifics of your server's configuration
2. Sentry.io (exception tracking): Fill sentry.dsn from the Sentry.io Project Settings (if you want to use exception reporting)
3. Pushover: Fill pushover.user and pushover.token from the Pushover Client page for your desired device

Directives

Directives are classes that direct the bot's interactions with Reddit. All Directives must be in a namespace's Directives subfolder and extend App\BaseDirective. A Directive is configured by supplying its attributes:

• name: A display-friendly name
• uid: A Unique identifier
• subreddits: An array of Subreddits to check
• patterns: An array of regex patterns to match in Submission content
• actions: An array of BaseAction classes (EmailAction and PushAction come by default)
• params: Additional parameters to pass to each Action

For example, to get an email and push notification every time "CodeIgniter" is mentioned on r/PHP you might use something like this:

protected $attributes = [
	'name'       => 'CodeIgniter on r/PHP',
	'uid'        => 'ci_php',
	'subreddits' => ['PHP'],
	'patterns'   => ['/CodeIgniter/i'],
	'actions'    => [
		'App\Actions\EmailAction',
		'App\Actions\PushoverAction'],
	'params'     => [
		['recipients' => 'my.email.address@example.com'],
		['html' => 1],
	]
];

Usage

Monitoring happens in three stages, each corresponding to its own command. Launch the commands from the CLI using CodeIgniter's "spark".

• Fetch: Scans for Directives and fetches their Submissions (Links/Posts and Comments), storing them locally as flat files. php spark reddit:fetch
• Filter: Filters stored submissions by the Directive regex patterns and loads them into the database. php spark reddit:filter
• Execute: Iterates through matched Submissions and runs the Directive's Action (e.g. notifications or responses). php spark reddit:execute

Note: The jobs are best run every minute by cron to get the latest results. They are intentionally split up to allow for job queue distribution.

Testing

Copy php.xml.dist to php.xml and follow the same configuration steps above using the values from the various test environments. Once the config file is complete you can run the tests:

composer test

GitHub Actions

There is a unit test action configured to run on GitHub for every pull request to the develop branch. There are necessary environment variables equivalent to those mentioned in the Configuration section above. These need to be supplied as Secrets on the GitHub repo and then added to the env section in the workflow definition YAML file.