rss-discord-bot/README.md

Discord cardiCast webhook

This is a simple webhook to push new cardiCast episodes into the cardiCast Discord channel.

install

1. Create and activate virtual env
2. Install requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Set up a cronjob (see below)
4. Test cronjob works
5. Relax

How it works

We run this on the newcardigan wordpress server.

1. With a cron job we call trigger.sh
2. The shell script sets env values then calls webhook.py
3. The python script checks a custom RSS feed for new podcast episodes
4. If no new episode, end
5. If new episode,
   1. save the guid to latest_post.txt for the next round of checking
   2. use the values from the RSS feed
   3. publish via a webhook to Discord

env values

These are all set in trigger.sh, not in crontab, to keep things contained.

We need to include some secrets via environment values:

• the guild/server ID (DISCORD_GUILD)
• the secret token for the webhook (DISCORD_TOKEN)
• the ID of the @cardiCast ping role (DISCORD_CARDICAST_PING)

And because we run python in a virtual environment:

venv - we need to activate the venv using source <path/to/venv>

Cron job command

*/18 * * * * cd /home/cardigan/rss-discord-bot && ./trigger.sh

RSS feed

The rss feed is https://newcardigan.org/category/cardiparties/?feed=featured_image_feed.

This special featured_image_feed is a slightly modified RSS2 feed. The only thing it does differently is include the featured image in an enclosure so that we can pick it up directly from the feed. See the newcardigan WordPress theme for how this works.