‘Retooter’ re-posts Mastodon messages mentioning an account

This is a small Mastodon bot, running on GitHub actions, that re-posts any ‘toots’ by anybody from a list of allowed accounts that mention one configurable account.

Retooter is written in Python and depends on the Mastodon.py package to interact with the server-side API.

Configuration

1. Enable actions for this repository Limit the actions to ‘Allow [repo-name], and select non-[repo-name], actions and reusable workflows’, and check the ‘Allow actions created by GitHub’ box

2. Define some action variables:

   • RETOOTER_ACCOUNT_NAME: set to the account that should retoot when it is mentioned. Omit the leading @, be sure to include the domain name (e.g., digigeolab@mastodon.online)
   • RETOOTER_ALLOWED_ACCOUNTS: a list of accounts, one per line, whose posts are re-tooted if they mention RETOOTER_ACCOUNT_NAME
   • (optional) RETOOTER_API_BASE_URL: if the API base url of the account’s instance differs from https:// + the domain part of the RETOOTER_ACCOUNT_NAME (e.g., https://mastodon.online), define it manually, here
   • (option) RETOOTER_DRY_RUN: if this variable is set to TRUE, retooter will not actually re-post any messages, but rather print them to stdout (which can be read from the log output of a GitHub action)

3. Create a new set of authentication keys. This is a multi-step process that includes running the script once locally, or in an interactive environment, in which you can copy and paste text from and to the script

   1. Install this project locally, e.g., in a virtual environment

      pip install git+https://github.com/DigitalGeographyLab/retooter.git
      

   2. Locally define the RETOOTER_ACCOUNT_NAME (and possibly RETOOTER_API_BASE_URL( you set above as an environment variable: if you use BASH or a similar shell, use export:

      export RETOOTER_ACCOUNT_NAME="digigeolab@mastodon.online"
      export RETOOTER_API_BASE_URL="https://mastodon.online"
      

   3. Run the package:

      python -m retooter
      

   4. The script will prompt you to open a web address (on the account‘s instance), login and authenticate there, and copy and paste the response back to the script.

   5. Then, it will print three variables: CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET, and ACCESS_TOKEN. Copy these and define them as GitHub action secrets.