A Mastodon bot posting riffs on the “it’s the bible not the straightble” joke. (Formerly a different Mastodon bot and before then also a Twitter bot.)
The bot is written in Rust. (An earlier version, which you can find in the Git history, was written in JS; it only supported Twitter and had minor differences in Unicode handling.)
Run cargo run to generate a post text (without sending a post),
or cargo test to run unit tests.
Cargo will automatically download and build dependencies as needed.
src/lib.rs is the meat of the bot, generating the post texts.
src/main.rs, the main binary (and default for cargo run), simply generates one post text and prints it out.
src/bin/post.rs is the binary that actually sends a post,
loading credentials from the .env file or process environment,
and the one that is deployed to the server.
You can run it directly with cargo run --bin post.
Build an image suitable as a portable service, using ./make-image.
An .env file with valid credentials must exist at image build time
and will be included in the image.
(The credentials are sensitive,
so they are not included in this repository
and you should not distribute the image containing them.
See .env.template for the format.)
Copy the resulting image (itsbinotstraight/) on some server into /var/lib/portables/,
attach it e. g. with portablectl attach itsbinotstraight
and enable it with systemctl enable --now itsbinotstraight.timer.
(You can also send a single post with systemctl start itsbinotstraight.service first, to see if it works.)
See also DEPLOYING.md.
The code in this repository is released under the AGPL v3,
as provided in the LICENSE file.