Today's Tee Bot with Python and Github Actions

#github #python #actionshackathon #devops

If you know me personally, you can see that I love nerd tee-shirts.
There are lots of websites that sell tees with several designs.
In particular, I prefer tee websites that propose t-shirts having designs made by little designers.
It means that any person can create a design and send it to one of these websites. If the project is very voted by the users of online tee shop, the administrators can decide to put on sale for 24 hours. Therefore, Every day a different t-shirt is sold.

Then, I decided to create a tee bot that sends today's tees sold from different tee shops.

How it works

Every day the telegram bot extracts today's tees with web scraping and sends the images and the titles on a public telegram channel.

Implementation

You can find the code in my GitHub repository: varieteebot.

The repository contains mainly three files:

tee.py: it contains the function get_tees that returns a list of objects of type Image. Each object contains:
- tee title
- URL of the image source
- URL of the tee shop
run.py: it sends the list of tees to the public telegram channel using the Telegram API. This script has two parameters:
- bot token
- channel id
python-app-test.yml: Github action that on the event push of the branch main installs the pip dependencies and executes the script using the GitHub secrets BOT_TOKEN and CHANNEL_TEST_ID. This action is used for the test.
python-app-prod.yml: Github action that on the event schedule (every day at 7 UTC) installs the pip dependencies and executes the script using the GitHub secrets BOT_TOKEN and CHANNEL_ID. This action is used for the main channel.

Configuration

Create the telegram bot using BotFather
Create a public telegram channel
Add the bot as the administrator of the channel
Fork my GitHub repository varieteebot
In the repository settings create 3 secrets:
- BOT_TOKEN: the token returned by the BotFather and used to call the Telegram Bot API
- CHANNEL_ID: the public telegram channel id on which the tees are sent (@channelname)
- CHANNEL_ID_TEST: the channel id for the test (I used my personal chat id)
Test opening the section Actions of the repository and clicking on Tee Bot [TEST] and on Run workflow
Test in your local environment by typing the following command
```
python run.py {BOT_TOKEN} {CHANNEL_ID}
```