Making a Twitter Bot in the Year 2024

I made a Twitter bot, the BC Child Care Bot #

Except, because it is 2024, using Twitter is uncool, so what I actually did instead was, I made a Mastodon Bot. It’s powered by github actions, meaning everyday it automatically pulls data from BC open map data, detects new vacancies using R, and sends a “toot” (that’s the mastodon word for “tweet”) to this account.

What is Mastodon #

If you’re like me and were not an avid Twitter user in the first place, you probably have never heard of Mastodon.

Well, Mastodon is basically Twitter - you create an account, follow people, and see posts from things you follow.

But unlike Twitter, the servers are decentralized, meaning nothing like what Elon did to Twitter can happen, because no single person “owns” all of the servers. Or something like that.

Why #

Anyways, I don’t really care much about Mastodon / Twitter / X or whatever. The main reason I made a the BC Child Care Bot was so that I could help my wife find day care vacancies for my son. And after struggling with deployment challenges in my previous project, I was interested in CICD and other cool things you can do with github actions.

How #

Github Actions #

I followed this post closely to learn how to make my own workflow. Essentially it uses github actions to run an R script in the github repository on a daily basis (a cron job).

This is the section that configures the cron job. I also set it up so that on a certain branch named “test”, the script will run. I use this for testing that the workflow works, without having to change the cron schedule everytime.

on:
  push:
    branches: ['test'] # push to this branch to test toots
  schedule:
    - cron: '41 15 * * *'  # trigger at 3pm UTC  every day

The other necessary component is to add mastdon API token to github repository as a “github secret”. Then in the workflow, the token is used with the following syntax:

${{ secrets.RTOOT_DEFAULT_TOKEN}}

Yay for open source #

The last component is making the R script to: pull data, identify NEW vacancies, create a tweet / toot to send.

I pulled data from BC gov’s open data portal, and figured out a way to ID new vacancies. Then, a message is crafted accounting for the character limits (500) for mastodon toots.

Actually the character limit is quite restrictive. Every day there can be 50-150 new vacancies over BC, depending on child care age group. But we only have 1 child (thank) so currently the bot only reports facilities with vacancy for children aged <36 months.

Every day this dataset is updated at this URL. The whole script depends on whether this URL stays the same. If it changes, the bot will stop working. Fingers crossed!