bomgifbot

README

Bomgifbot

This is a bot that pulls images from the web, appends them to a gif and posts the result to mastodon.

Hosting

This repo is set up to be run on a fly.io instance to make self-hosting easy. The basic free account is good enough for this purpose.

The bring-up process is pretty trivial:

1. Install git and flyctl
    `sudo apt install git`
    `curl -L https://fly.io/install.sh | sh`
2. Clone this repo
    `git clone git@github.com:tjhowse/bomgifbot.git`
3. `flyctl auth signup`
4. Set the config in the `env` section of `fly.toml`
5. Set all the secrets listed in secrets.toml.template
    `flyctl secrets set MASTODON_CLIENT_ID=<your client id> MASTODON_CLIENT_SECRET=<your client secret>`, etc
6. `flyctl deploy`

To pause the app, run flyctl scale count 0. To resume, run flyctl deploy.

Configuration

Setting	Description	Secret	Example	Default
MASTODON_SERVER	The URL of the mastodon server to post to	No	https://botsin.space	N/A
MASTODON_CLIENT_ID	The client ID of the mastodon app to use	Yes	1234567890	N/A
MASTODON_CLIENT_SECRET	The client secret of the mastodon app to use	Yes	1234567890	N/A
MASTODON_USER_EMAIL	The email address of the mastodon account	Yes	woo@you.com	N/A
MASTODON_USER_PASSWORD	The user password of the mastodon account	Yes	1234567890	N/A
MASTODON_TOOT_INTERVAL	The number of seconds between posts on mastodon	No	1800	N/A
IMAGE_URL	The image to regularly download and append to the gif. Can be http/s or ftp	No	https://example.com/image.png	N/A
IMAGE_UPDATE_INTERVAL	The interval in seconds between downloading the image	No	300	300
IMAGE_FRAME_COUNT	The number of frames to keep in the gif	No	12	12
IMAGE_FRAME_DELAY	The delay between frames in the gif, in 100ths of a second	No	50	50
IMAGE_MINIMUM_DURATION	The minimum duration of an animation in seconds. Increases the frame delay to avoid jittery images with low frame counts.	No	1	1
TEST_MODE	Controls whether the gif is written to disk rather than being posted to mastodon	No	false	false