tootapalooza/README.md

toota-palooza

Python program to fill a mastodon timeline with randomized toots.

Setting up a Dev environment

So you want to run this yourself, eh?

You need:

1. A bot account on an instance. Go create one. Do not enable MFA on it.
2. Python

Python prep

1. Check out the code.
2. cd to the repository.
3. Build it and install it in your working environment.
   1. python3 -m venv .venv
   2. . .venv/bin/activate
   3. pip install -r requirements.txt
   4. Assuming your current working directory is the root of this repository, install into your build environment with pip install -e .
4. Copy the example.env file to a file named .env in the root of this repo.
5. Edit that .env file to contain all the secrets!

Initialise your Mastodon app

This is a one-time thing you do ever. First time you go to run the bot in a new environment where it hasn't run before.

1. Find toota-palooza/__init__.py and edit it
2. Edit the lines to uncomment them and change any values you need to (like app name and server)
3. Run it one time (e.g., python __init__.py). It should just exit, creating the file.
4. Edit the file and comment the lines out again. You just do that once.

Running

Set get the toota-palooza command into your path so you can invoke it. Run pip install -e .

Assuming everything is up to date, all your files initialised with correct values, you can just run toota-palooza --once.

By default it will try to run as a daemon.