learning_alerter

API query tool & web scraper that can run on a schedule to find and post about free learning content. Requires python >=3.6

Conference talk

Watch the presentation "Scrape the Web for Fun & Nonprofit with Python" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJt9chRniLE

Prepare a non-containerized environment

virtualenv venv -p python3
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the program

Schedule execution similar to the following examples.

To use a Slack webhook:

python main.py --packt --slackwebhook 'https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'

Note: Slack now requires you to use the webhook configuration in order to set the display name, the avatar/icon, and the targeted channel. See the instructions here on creating a Slack webhook.

To use a legacy Slack API token (now deprecated, you can no longer create new ones):

python main.py --packt --slacktoken 'xoxp-your-super-secret-slack-token' --slackchannel '#yourchannel'

Troubleshooting

Check the log file learning_alerter.log, which is written to the root of this directory by default.

Run tests

From the root of the repository/project, run:

python -m pytest

Build Docker image

From the root of the repository/project, run:

docker build -t learning_alerter .

Run in Docker

After you've built the container image locally using docker build, then run:

docker run -it -e SLACKWEBHOOK='https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' -e PACKT=true learning_alerter:latest

Note: if running from a cron, omit the -it flags, as interactive (-i) and tty (-t) are not available in cron.

.