heathbot

tweets and toots Extremely Official Heathcliff Comics™.

https://mastodon.social/@heathcliff

https://twitter.com/its_heathcliff no longer functional on twitter as of may 2023

https://bsky.app/profile/heathbot.bsky.social

this is a twitter and mastodon and bsky bot written in typescript and running on node.js.

you can run it on your computer or remix it into something new! you'll need node and git installed. (you'll also need yarn v1. if you're on a recent version of node, just run corepack enable and you'll be good to go.)

then run:

git clone https://github.com/lostfictions/heathbot
cd heathbot
yarn install

to install the dependencies.

you'll also need some heathcliff comics to work with! you can find some on the internet. same them to a folder named persist/heathcliff in the repo directory. or place them anywhere els on your computer and set the DATA_DIR environment variable when running the bot to tell it where to look.

when you're ready, run

yarn dev

to start generating some images locally. they'll be output to your system's temp directory, and the bot will print the file locations as it goes.

in a server environment, this bot can be run with docker for an easier time. (i recommend dokku if you're looking for a nice way to develop and host bots on your own server.)

the bot needs environment variables if you want it to do stuff:

• MASTODON_TOKEN: a Mastodon user API token

• MASTODON_SERVER: the instance to which API calls should be made (usually where the bot user lives.) (default: https://mastodon.social)

• BSKY_USERNAME: your Bluesky username

• BSKY_PASSWORD: your Bluesky app password

• TWITTER_API_KEY, TWITTER_API_SECRET, TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN, and TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET: you need all of these guys to make a tweet. twitter broke api usage in may 2023 and this code has been removed.

• DATA_DIR: the directory to search for heathcliff comics. (default: 'persist')

heathbot uses the znv library as well as dotenv, so you can alternately stick any of the above environment variables in a file named .env in the project root. (it's gitignored, so there's no risk of accidentally committing private API tokens you put in there.)

more bots?