updatebot is a Mastodon bot that tells you just how it is feeling every day at a set time.
Use Poetry to set up an environment and install dependencies.
Edit the client section in updatebot.ini to set up your bot as a Mastodon client.
The most important thing to change is your api_base_url, unless you're also using botsin.space.
You'll probably also want to set a client_name to identify your bot.
The first time you run your update bot, if it doesn't have the necessary keys, it will register the bot application and give you a URL you must visit to authenticate your bot.
Configuration for how the bot toots is in the updates section of updatebot.ini.
adverbs specifies where the adverbs.txt file is, which contains all the possible adverbs the bot can use.
morning_hour, evening_hour and timezone specifies what hour the bot will toot on. I invoke updatebot every hour because my server is in UTC; the bot then figures out if it's 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. in Detroit or not to decide whether to toot.
morning_preambles_file and evening_preambles_file are the preambles that will be randomly picked-from depending on whether it's the morning hour or the evening hour.
feeling is how the bot feels.
updatebot doesn't schedule itself. Instead, you can set it up in your crontab.
I have updatebot running in its own Python venv, so my crontab line looks like this:
0 * * * * cd $HOME/src/updatebot && ./bin/python updatebot ./updatebot.ini
updatebot was inspired by BiBot, but is a brand-new implementation by me, since, at the time, I didn't know it was Misha Fletcher who created it. Since then, I've done a lot of work to try to give it my own personality.
My bi update bot runs on this codebase.