A simple-ish Mastodon/Twitter bot that posts pretty pictures of cellular automata.

The 1D cellular automaton generation is based on a previous project of mine, while the tooting/tweeting and logging part is adapted from another project of mine. Everything is a remix.

The most vital dependency, apart from Python 3 which the bot is written in, is Cairo. You'll need to figure out how to install it on your system yourself, but chances are that it's available through your package manager. In fact, it might already be installed and you don't have to do anything!

Assuming things have gone smoothly so far, let's proceed – I suggest using the venv module (which is conveniently included in your Python installation) to avoid dependency hell. Run the following commands to get the bot installed on your system:

$ git clone https://github.com/doersino/sundryautomata
$ python3 -m venv sundryautomata
$ cd sundryautomata
$ source bin/activate
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

(To deactivate the virtual environment, run deactivate.)

Copy config.sample.ini to config.ini, open it and modify it based on the instructions in the comments. Most notably, fill in your Mastodon or Twitter API credentials (but the bot will still generate images without those).

Once you've set everything up and configured it to your liking, run:

$ python3 sundryautomata.py

That's basically it!

If you want your bot to post at predefined intervals, use cron, runwhen or a similar tool. To make cron work with venv, you'll need to use bash and execute the activate script before running the bot (in this example, it runs every six hours at 42 minutes past the hour):

42 */6 * * * /usr/bin/env bash -c 'cd /PATH/TO/sundryautomata && source bin/activate && python3 sundryautomata.py'