pet-finder

App that scrapes the Danish animal protection association website and sends a telegram when a new pet is available. Small sized projects that samples a lot of practical code, which can easily be transferrable to other projects:

• Web monitoring/scraping
• SQLite database
• Telegram bot
• Github action
• Crontab
• Docker containers

I use this code as a running project to implement newly learned coding techniques and ideas.

Installation

The repo is setup so as to install petfinder as a package. Once cloned and done creating a virtual environment, pip install the repo in editable mode (-e), which will take care of all the dependencies.

$ git clone https://github.com/RaphaelSura/pet-finder.git
$ cd pet-finder
$ python -m virtualenv .env
$ source .env/bin/activate
$ pip install -e .

Now petfinder is like any other python package.

from petfinder.database import PetDB

Code formatting

Following Google Python style guide: https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html. This is set in VScode via .vscode/settings.json. Alternatively, run manually:

$ yapf *.py -r -i

Telegram bot setup

Install Telegram app on your phone or computer and create an account. Search for Botfather and type the following two commands in the chat:

• /start to get the BotFather bot setup.

• /newbot to create a new bot.

Choose a bot name e.g. FindMyPetBot. Then choose a bot usernmae e.g. mypetfinder_bot (must end with the word 'bot'). After creating the bot, it will display an HTTP API token ,you'll need this shortly.

Now start a conversation with the bot, in the telegram app search for @bot_name and press START.

In a browser, type https://api.telegram.org/bot{my_bot_http_api_token}/getUpdates, where you use the correct value for your bot API token. In the response, note down the Chat ID.

Put the HTTP API token and chat ID into etc/telegram_creds.txt. Note: the etc folder is in .gitignore as the content shouldn't be public.

Run the app - several ways

CRONTAB on Ubuntu server

# python script for Pet App bot, runs every 10 minutes from 6am til midnight
*/10 6-23 * * * ~/pet-finder/.env/bin/python3 ~/pet-finder/app_with_crontab.py

Inside DOCKER container

cd pet-finder
docker build -t pet-finder:latest .

Get the image_id with docker images | grep pet-finder. Then run in detached mode:

docker run -d --restart unless-stopped image_id