ImagesOfNetwork

Tools for managing the ImagesOfNetwork on reddit

Getting Started

Laying out the steps for getting it running here.

Install package

$ git clone [email protected]:amici-ursi/ImagesOfNetwork.git
$ cd ImagesOfNetwork
$ virtualenv -v venv-ion -p python3
$ source venv-ion/bin/activate
$ python setup.py install

NOTE: If you're developing rather than deploying, go ahead and use python setup.py develop instead. That way, as you make changes to the source, they'll get picked up as you go.

Reddit

These tools make extensive use of the Reddit API (duh), so lets make sure that that's all set up. Head on over to your apps preferences and click the button to create a developer app. You should see 5 fields here.

• name: Anything you want, you're the only one that's going to see it.
• radio buttons: Make sure script is selected
• description: Again just for you. You can even leave it blank.
• about url: ditto
• redirect url: This one's important for setting up OAuth. The tools are set up to use http://127.0.0.1:65010/authorize_callback

Click create app, and note the series of digits under "personal use script". that's your client id. Also, you'll need to keep tabs on the value of secret.

Settings

Now that we've got reddit ready for us, we need to configure our program. Create an configuration file, either ion.toml in your working directory, or in ~/.config/ion/settings.toml. This file will contain your api access information as well as any other settings overwriting the defaults. Here's a sample.

[auth]
username = 'your-username'
password = 'your-password'

client-id = 'your-client-id'
client-secret = 'your-client-secret'
refresh-token = 'your-refresh-token'

If you don't have a refresh token yet, we'll set that up shortly, so don't worry about it. either leave it an empty string or just omit that line.

OAuth

Reddit knows about our scripts, our scripts know how to talk to reddit, but they don't actually have permission to do that just yet. Fortunately for you, there's a tool to make it easy, and you've already installed it. just run

ion_setup_oauth

It'll send you reddit asking for all the permissions we need, and start a little web server locally to collect what we need to get going. After you've accepted the request on reddit, you can go ahead and close out of the browser, we're done with it. The script should print out a line that looks something like

refresh-token = '56208746x-eC0VB-j2J4T9JoD91xNqclWmGk'

Copy that line and stick it in your configuration file. The scripts will use it, along with the other information we got from reddit earlier to prove that it has permission to operate on your behalf.

Rock-em Sock-em Robots

We're ready to roll. We've got everything we need installed, all the priveledges with reddit, and it looks like we're good to go. Let's take a moment here to pat ourselves on the back. We've done some good work.

Ok, I suppose we should get back to the real work here.

Network Preparation

If you're working on the ImagesOf network, skip this, it's already done.

Otherwise, this is for you. These scripts follow a model of one central subreddit forming a model for a bunch of other subreddits. We're going to create a network of subreddits, and each of those are going to copy settings from the master.

Go ahead and create your master subreddit. Set it up the way you want. Privacy settings, flairs, you name it, the basic settings, at least, will all be copied over when we start making the real subs in our network. Just not wiki pages. They're handled separately, mostly for moderation purposes.

Make sure you at least create the wiki pages 'userblacklist' and 'subredditblacklist'. You don't have to put anything in them if you don't want, but they need to be there. If you do want to blacklist some things off the bat, each should contain a list of users or subreddits, prefixed by /u/ or /r/, one per line.

Great, we've got something to work off of now. Let's move on.

Network Expansion

Adding new subreddits to the network should be a fairly simple process. We have A nice simple script to do the job for us. It assumes that our network name is a prefix, so if that's not what you want, you'll need to make some code adjustments. Otherwise, here's the command:

ion_expand Topic

Now watch it work it's magic. When it's done, you should have a nice, all prepared subreddit called NetworkNameTopic.

If you're nervous about automatically creating subreddits, you can take a look at what it's going to do by using the --dry-run flag. We won't hit reddit, but it should at least give you an idea of what's going to happen.

Now we probably want to do something with it. It's time to move back to our settings file. In settings.toml, you'll find a number of [child.subname] sections. Create a section for your new subreddit with all the configuration you need. There's a template to give you an idea of how things work.

Note: reddit only allows subreddit creation once every 10 minutes or so. Don't get too excited, take your time. Maybe use the time between creations to make sure everything looks right. If we didn't copy something right, let us know.

Running The Bot

We have credentials, we have a network, now let's start copying posts!

ion_bot

That's really all there is to it. Everything should be set up already. Maybe keep an eye on it amd make sure what it's doing is sane, but we should be in business.

Supervisord

Ok, ok, so nothing's perfect. We want to monitor our process so that if the bot fails, we can prop it back up again. supervisord is a sane choice. Make sure it's installed on your machine (excercise left up to the reader). Here's a little bit of configuration to get you started, assuming you went ahead and used the virtualenv as instructed.

[program:ion_bot]
directory=/path/to/ImagesOfNetwork/
command=/path/to/ImagesOfNetwork/venv-ion/bin/ion_bot
stdout_logfile=/var/log/ion_bot.stdout.log
stderr_logfile=/var/log/ion_bot.stderr.log

Replace /path/to with the appropriate path. Make sure supervisord is set up and running. You can then use supervisorctl to check on the status of the daemon, and see what we're logging in the specified logfile.