GameDayAlerts

This is a bot designed to alert you to when a baseball/football game is about to destroy your evening commute.

• Runs weekly
• Uses a timedelta of 3 hours from start (baseball) or 3.5 hours (football) to guestimate the end of the game.
• Looks for Orioles/Ravens games ending between 3:00pm and 5:30pm. Monday-Friday
• In the event of a game notifications are sent to a Discord Webhook.

Setup

Setup a Linux Host

I'm using Ubuntu LTS on an Oracle Cloud VM. There are free-tiers available as of today. Google Compute and Amazon AWS are similar products. You can also roll your own host with an old PC or a Raspberry Pi. You'll need to know a bit of Linux CLI or you'll need to be ready to learn! Run these commands through the CLI.

Setup Git

1. Create a Github account.

2. Go here and install Git if you don’t have it already.

3. Assuming you're reading this on the repo page, select ‘fork’ to create a copy of it to your Github account.

4. From your new repo, select Code and then under Clone copy the HTTPS URL (e.g. https://github.com/SaltySOMAdmin/GameDayAlerts.git) to download a local copy

5. Navigate to a folder you want a local copy of the repo to live, and clone the Github repo to your host:

   1. It's up to you where to put the repo - recommended in a folder like /home/YourUserAcct/Github/ or /home/YourUserAcct/. Once you clone the directory it will create a subfolder with the name of your fork.
   2. git clone <url>
      1. e.g. git clone https://github.com/SaltySOMAdmin/GameDayAlerts.git

Install necessary software prerequisites:

1. Install Python3

   sudo apt install python3
   

2. Create a python virtual environment in a directory

   /usr/bin/python3 -m venv /home/ubuntu/GameDayAlerts
   

3. Use the virtual python3 environment

   source /home/ubuntu/GameDayAlerts/bin/activate
   

4. Install PIP Prereqs

   pip3 install requests pytz
   

5. Setup Discord Webhook - Right click the channel in Discord --> Edit Channel --> Integrations --> Create Webhook. Paste your webhook into webhook.txt.

   sudo nano /home/ubuntu/GameDayAlerts/webhook.txt
   

Configure the script.

• There are several sections you need to customize in the main script (Alerts.py). You'll need to enter your team names and your MLB Team ID (from this link: https://github.com/jasonlttl/gameday-api-docs/blob/master/team-information.md).

• You'll also need to enter the link to your team's schedule from the ESPN API def fetch_ravens_games(): url = "https://site.api.espn.com/apis/site/v2/sports/football/nfl/teams/bal/schedule"

Crontab Settings

This is where you will set your schedule to run. My script runs every Sunday. To open your cron settings type this into your terminal: crontab -e

• Run main script

    0 12 * * 0 /bin/bash -c "source /home/ubuntu/GameDayAlerts/bin/activate && python3 /home/ubuntu/GameDayAlerts/Alerts.py"
  

Setup Continuous Deployment with Github Actions

Allows you to deploy your code via Github vs logging into the VPS and updating the code/uploading a new file. Allows for easier collaboration as well. I followed a guide similar to this one: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/deploying/deploying-with-github-actions