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fedibot

Write your own simple Fediverse bot

1. Acquire the ingredients

  • systemd
  • fortune-mod

2. Write the shell script

Create an account to the desired instance, then login to that account with toot. Make sure you do this with the user account the cron job is going to run as.

~/bin/dugbot
#!/bin/sh
toot post -l fr -u "dansunegalaxie@pouet.quebec" "$(fortune -sn5000 dansunegalaxie)"

You will want to make sure the output of the command you give out to toot post isn't longer than the character limit allowed by your instance, or else it won't post. In this instance, you can set the -n parameter of fortune to that character limit so it can try to not come up with fortunes longer than this.

3. Run cron job

/etc/systemd/system/dugbot.service
[Unit]
Description=Post a random DUG quote to Mastodon
 
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/home/yuki/bin/dugbot
User=yuki

Make sure to point ExecStart to the path of your script, and User to the user account you used to login to your bot account with toot.

/etc/systemd/system/dugbot.timer
[Unit]
Description=Run dugbot every 30 minutes
 
[Timer]
OnCalendar=*:00,30
 
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

The .timer file should have the same file name as the corresponding .service.

Enable the timer:

sudo systemctl enable dugbot.timer
sudo systemctl start dugbot.timer

Or run it once:

sudo systemctl start dugbot.service

Current list of bots

fedibot.txt · Last modified: 2025/02/13 16:37 by Yuki