newsie

Daily collections of articles straight to Slack (tutorial video here).

Initial Setup

This uses pipenv to manage the virtual env and all dependencies. If you don't have pipenv install it here then:

git clone https://github.com/automagictv/newsie.git
cd newsie
pipenv install --ignore-pipfile

To run:

You'll need to set a few environment variables first. The required ones are as follows:

export NEWS_API_KEY="YourKeyHere"
export SLACK_BOT_TOKEN="YourTokenHere"

Then run:

pipenv run python newsie/runner.py

Note that you may have to adjust your python path to run the above. If so, you can run this with:

cd newsie
PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$(pwd) pipenv run python newsie/runner.py

If you want to set this up on a cron, you can do something like:

# Run at 12:05 AM every day
5 0 * * * pipenv run python /path/to/newsie/runner.py >> /path/to/cronlog.txt 2>&1

You may have to add /usr/local/bin to your path for the above to work.

Config

This uses the config.py file to set certain constants, filters and queries when calling slack or news api.

The QUERIES object is what is used to retrieve headlines. To add a new query, add an entry to the object using the newsie/query_helper.py object, QueryHelper.

Testing

This package uses pytest. So to run the tests, execute the following:

pipenv run python -m pytest

Or to test an individual module, run:

pipenv run python -m pytest tests/[test_module].py

Slack

This uses the Slack API to send news articles to your desired channel. It makes use of the Rich Message Layout to format the messages. The format we use is as follows:

{
    "type": "section",
    "text": {
        "type": "mrkdwn",
        "text": "some text"
    }
},
{
    "type": "divider"
},
{
    "type": "section",
    "text": {
        "type": "mrkdwn",
        "text": "Article"
    },
    "accessory": {
        "type": "image",
        "image_url": "image.jpg",
        "alt_text": "alt text for image"
    }
},
{
    "type": "actions",
    "elements": [
        {
            "type": "button",
            "text": {
                "type": "plain_text",
                "text": "Read the Full Article"
            },
            "value": "article_link",
            "url": "https://www.google.com"
        }
    ]
}

For full instructions on how to set up / connect to the slack api, see this tutorial.