RSS BOT¶

The Teamwire RSS bot allows to periodically retrieve RSS feeds and push their entries as messages in Teamwire chats.

The RSS bot source code is part of the bot source code is part of the Teamwire SDK Bot Examples package:

Usage¶

After having added the bot to a chat you can send a message with the text

/rss help

to get a brief help for the available commands:

`/rss feed add <url>`: add a new rss feed to get updates from in the current chat
`/rss feed list`: return the list of feeds for the current chat
`/rss feed remove <index>`: remove a given feed
`/rss feed load <index>`: load the last 3 entries for the the given feed
`/rss time add <hour:min>`: ask the bot to send updates to this chat at the given time
`/rss time list`: list the update times for the current chat
`/rss time remove <index>`: remove a given update time
`/rss help`: list supported commands

The bot allows adding a list of feed URLs to be fetched at specific times of the day.

In order to add a feed you can use the

/rss feed add <url>

command, where <url> is the URL of the RSS feed. Using the

/rss feed list

command, a list all the added feeds will be returned in the chat.

It is possible to set multiple feed update times in the same chat, using the

/rss time add <hour:min>

command. Similarly, in order to list the currently active update times, you can use the

/rss time list

command.

Running the bot from python sources¶

Requirements¶

In order to run the RSS bot from python sources you need to first install the Teamwire Python SDK and follow the Getting Started guide.

Running the bot¶

Note: in this section, depending on the system and environment you use, references to the python and pip, might need to be replaced with python3 and pip3.

First, ensure that requirements are installed:

    $ pip install -r requirements.txt

In order to start the bot you simply have to run:

    $ python rssbot.py

Please ensure that the following environment variables are correctly set:

TW_API_APPID
TW_API_SECRET
TW_API_HOST

These should correspond to the bot credentials created in the Teamwire Admin dashboard.

RSS configuration storage¶

The bot configuration for each chat involving the bot (i.e. the lists of feeds and update times) are stored in a rss-conf.json file in the current working directory of the script. In order to use a different location for the above file, it is possible to set the RSS_BOT_CONFIG environment variable with the full path to the config file location. For example:

    $ export RSS_BOT_CONFIG=/path/to/rss-conf.json

Please note that the configuration file is automatically created and managed by the bot, and it should not be modified by anyone.

Deploying the bot with Docker¶

A docker image for the RSS bot is available for Teamwire Partners on Teamwire's Harbor Registry in the bots/rssbot repository.

In order to deploy the above docker image in a docker environment, you should run:

    docker run -d --restart always --network host --name rssbot \
    -e TW_API_APPID="<YOUR APP ID>" \
    -e TW_API_SECRET="<YOUR API SECRET>" \
    -e TW_API_HOST="<YOUR BACKEND URL>" \
    -e RSS_BOT_CONFIG="/config/rss_config.json" \
    -e PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8 \
    -v /path/to/config/dir:/config \
    harbor.teamwire.eu/bots/rssbot:1.6.0

The above docker run command creates a new container named rssbot and passes all the required environment variables to it. In order to make the bot configuration file independent from the container, a volume is set, mounting the /path/to/config/dir external directory to the internal /config directory. The RSS_BOT_CONFIG environment variable ensures that the configuration file is loaded from the volume.