Back in 2022, I created “Good Morning, Milwaukee!“. It is a bot that posts every day at 6 am with the weather, the times for sunrise and sunset, and a photo from around the city. When I first wrote it, I wrote it in Node and put it up on Pipedream. Lately, there have been some issues with the weather API that it was using, so I decided to replace it with the OpenWeather API but I figured that while I was at it, I would rewrite it in Python, dockerize it, and run it on my new home lab server.
Let’s start with what the actual Python script looks like.
If you want to reuse this code to create your own bot, there are variables at the top for api_key, zip_code, and mastodon_access_token. The actual posting is done using Mastodon.py.
So, what would the Dockerfile look like?
You’ll notice that it also needs a requirements.txt and a crontab file. Lets see what those look like.
Just make sure that you have a newline at the end of your crontab file. At this point, you can run docker build -t gmmke-app . to build the docker image and then run docker run -d gmmke-app run the container.