let's talk taco twitter bots

[dansinker]

So @meetar built the taco_fancy twitter bot to tweet whenever a new file has been added to the repo, so people can see when something delicious has been added. YAY. But, the user experience isn't super great, since it tweets the commit message, not the actual title of the taco object added.

I'm thinking that @knowtheory's work in automation might make this twitter bot's messages more human-readable, by being able to simply tweet the title of the recipe, which he's deriving to add to the index. That and then a link to the recipe (I believe currently it links to the PR), would be amazing.

THEN, what if we were to use @evz's API to do one better: What if someone could tweet @ the tacobot and get a random taco recipe in return?

TACO ALL THE TWITTERS.

Also, I've managed to get my hands on the tacobot twitter account, which will replace taco_fancy once the right levers have been pulled over at the Big Bird HQ.

UPDATE: tacobot is now the valid twitter account for this effort.

[meetar]

I like it. That will also prevent all those charming but extraneous tweets (a file was moved or renamed, non-recipe file added, branches merged, etc).

I'll have yet to grok the automation and API but I should be able to get into those this week.

Also if anyone would like to peruse the bot code, an anonymized version is hosted here:
github.com/meetar/taco-tweeter/

I welcome improvements.

[evz]

@sinker Love it. @meetar I'll take a look at your code in the coming days (I'm off work tomorrow so there's a good chance I'll have some time) and see what I can see. Are you opposed to turning that sucker into a Flask app? Should not be too difficult.

[knowtheory]

The automation is designed to be as stupid as possible (trying to forestall the tacobot ascendency over humankind).

1. I want scripts in the actual repo which read the current state of the repo, and build various index files.
2. I want a robot which listens for commits via webhook, compares the state of the repo before and after the push that's been received and does (one or more of) the following:
   • rebuild and commit the index if there are any changes to the indexes
   • tweet about changes to the repo

No. 2 there will require the bot to know some stuff about git. I was going to go basic and just do pull/push/status essentially. (Basically, when notified, the bot pulls from the repo, then runs the index scripts. If recipes have been added/removed/tagged w/in the repo, then the index script will update the indexes with new content, which git status will indicate. If there is new content to commit, the bot should commit it, and push the results).

If we add tweeting stuff to that, it'll happen at approximately the same time that the indexes are rebuilt. It could either happen via looking at the intermediate results of the indexing process, or it could look at the commit log, or some combination of the two.

[dansinker]

CONFIRMING: taco_fancy is now tacobot

[knowtheory]

ENGAGE!

[dansinker]

WHOA.

[meetar]

@evz Not opposed to Flasking!

@knowtheory Yeah, I'd guess downloading and diffing the repo is probably the best bet. The GitHub json package that comes in the WebHook triger includes information about added and removed files, but it's a bit too vague for the kind of logic we're discussing – specifically, it doesn't include the path to the commit, just the name, and it can't identify renames.

So what do we all think about a master webhook that does the pulling and diffing, triggers the Cakefile on every commit, checks for new files in any subdirectory, and if it finds any pulls the title from the API and sends it to the tweetbot? (N.b. I haven't used Flask or Cake but they're just common nouns, how hard can they be)

[evz]

@sinker @meetar I just deployed the thingy that replies with a taco recipe when you mention @tacobot on twitter. It's on Heroku so I can add you guys as collaborators if you'd like.

[evz]

...or whoever. I'm open.

[dansinker]

WHOOOOOOO.

Is the code up on git?

[dansinker]

Eventually we need to set all this stuff up under a tacofancy github organization huh.

[evz]

yup: https://github.com/evz/random-taco-tweeter

[evz]

Yeah, this is getting that kind of complex.

[dansinker]

I just submitted a pull request to the bot. I actually have no idea if
what I added actually works, because I'm an asshole.

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Eric van Zanten
notifications@github.comwrote:

Yeah, this is getting that kind of complex.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/94#issuecomment-28347764
.

[evz]

I think I'm going to need to take this thing down for a few. It's apparently not really stable the way that it's running on heroku. I'll need to dig into the docs over there and see what I need to do to get it to run.