Discord RSS Bot

Primary location is https://gitlab.com/ffreiheit/discord_feedbot -- github.com/freiheit/discord_feedbot is a mirror and all others are forks.

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Bot for taking in an RSS or Atom feed and sharing it into a Discord channel.

Designed to be very configurable.

It should be possible to use as a library in another bot.

Since this bot doesn't react to anything in channels or messages, you can have it sign into the same account as another bot, and externally it should appear to be a single bot.

Elite: Dangerous related Discord?

If your Discord server is related to Elite: Dangerous, you may be able to use my feedbot instance instead of running your own copy. Head to https://discord.gg/5HK2yQj and "Follow" the rooms you want.

(I have some other feeds, but E:D is the most thoroughly covered)

Initial Setup

1. Make sure the time on your system is correct. (NTP strongly recommended)
2. Go here: https://discordapp.com/developers/applications/me#top
3. Register an "application" and create an "app bot user".
4. Replace "APP_CLIENT_ID" with the App's Client ID in this URL: https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?&client_id=APP_CLIENT_ID&scope=bot&permissions=157696
   • Use https://discordapi.com/permissions.html to generate alt URLs
     • Send messages: absolutely required
     • Embed links: highly recommended, so that links get a preview (use <link> instead of link in config to avoid preview)
     • Mention @everyone, etc: only needed if intend to have bot ping users
     • Manage messages: needed if you want the bot to "publish" messages in an "announcement" channel so that other server owners can "Follow" and get those messages in their channels)
5. Give that URL to the Discord server/guild owner and have them authorize the bot.
6. git clone this repo.
7. Copy feed2discord.ini to feed2discord.local.ini
8. Put the App Bot User's 'Token' in the .ini file. (optional: copy just [MAIN] and that token field to feed2discord.auth.ini and leave it out of feed2discord.local.ini so that config is more shareable)
9. Set the timezone in the .ini file to the same as the timezone on your server.
10. Get all the channel IDs (Turn on "Developer Mode" in Settings/Appearance, then right-click channel)
11. Figure out your feeds.

• You'll need to figure out what fields by examining what's in an item in your feeds. You can use show_sample_entry.py to help.

12. configure feeds in feed2discord.local.ini (anything that's not MAIN, CHANNELS or DEFAULT is assumed to be a feed)
13. Run the bot.
14. Recommended: set up as a "service" that automatically runs.
    • Look at tools/feedbot.service for example for Linux with systemd option

Adding a feed

I have a utility, "newfeed.py" that helps you add a feed.

newfeed.py setup:

1. You must use feed2discord.local.ini in the current directory
2. Recommend that you also move the login_token into feed2discord.auth.ini (in a [MAIN] section)
3. In your discord, set up a "default" room and assign it all the right permissions for feedbot to be able to post
4. Get that channel ID and put it into [CHANNELS] section like default = 12345678901234

newfeed.py usage:

1. Find the feed URL
2. Run ./newfeed.py https://example.com/blog/feed.xml with your feed URL
3. Read what it says
4. Restart afterwards

Alternately, customize newfeed.sh to match your configuration for where the config files are, whether or not to git commit stuff, how to restart your feedbot, and use ./newfeed.sh https://example.com/blog/feed.xml (If you want to match my configuration, use linux, run everything as "bots", put feed2discord.local.ini into /home/bots/feedbot-config/ as a private git repository, and symlink feed2discord.local.ini to appear in feedbot's directory)

My configuration

The configuration of my instance of feedbot (minus auth token) is here: https://gitlab.com/ffreiheit/feedbot-config

Use as Library

I have not tested at all, but I have tried to make it possible to plug this in as a library. Probably needs work. You'll need to replace your simple "client.run()" with the more complicated stuff inside the if name block instead (in order to insert the background task coroutines into async)

If you want to do live changes, you should be able to change the CONFIG variable.

I'm guessing a few changes will need to be made in order to run as a library, like maybe changing how client= gets set, to something with a setup function that takes an optional client argument, maybe? If you figure it out, please give me a pull request.

If you don't need live changes, since this bot is read-only, it can easily be running alongside another bot using same account to appear as a single user.

Requirements

(see also requirements.txt)

• Python 3.6+ (might work with recent python 3.5.x if you modify the version check, but 3.6 is what I'm running it with)
• sqlite3 -- Usually comes with python
• discord.py
• feedparser
• html2text
• in_place (only used by newfeed.py; otherwise optional)

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I have a feed ping a specific person or role?

Yes. Add a string with their ping text to the fields.

How do I figure out what fields are in a feed? or I get "no such field" errors.

Use show_sample_entry.py http://example.com/your_feed/thing.rss. This dumps out the data structure that our feed parsing library produces.

How do I figure out my timezone?

On Windows, check settings/time for the timezone or run "tzutil /g".

On Unix/Linux systems, this is more complicated than it should be. Things to check:

• echo $TZ
• ls -l /etc/localtime
• cat /etc/timezone
• find /usr/share/zoneinfo/ -type f| xargs md5sum | grep $(md5sum /etc/localtime | cut -d' ' -f1)
• date +%Z # careful, may give you a timezone only useful half of the year

It looks like it's working, but nothing posts, and logs say too old; skipping for everything.

Double-check your timezone settings! If the timezone isn't right, and max_age is under 24 hours (86400), then it's possible for brand-new posts to look too old to post.

If it all looks right, try turning on debug in .ini. Then look for output like this:

DEBUG:__main__:reddit:now:1467657389.0983927
DEBUG:__main__:reddit:now:gmtime:time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=18, tm_min=36, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=186, tm_isdst=0)
DEBUG:__main__:reddit:now:localtime:time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=11, tm_min=36, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=186, tm_isdst=1)
DEBUG:__main__:reddit:timezone.localize(datetime.now()):2016-07-04 11:36:29.098784-07:00
DEBUG:__main__:reddit:pubDate:Mon Jul 04 14:04:44 UTC 2016
DEBUG:__main__:reddit:pubDate_parsed:2016-07-04 14:04:44+00:00
DEBUG:__main__:reddit:pubDate_parsed.astimezome(timezone):2016-07-04 07:04:44-07:00

If now:localtime doesn't look like your current time and/or now:gmtime doesn't look like current UTC time, that's your problem. now:gmtime being off indicates your system clock is wrong. If now:gmtime is right, but now:localtime is not, you probably have the timezone set wrong in your .ini file.

Workarounds:

• set timezone to "UTC" and also run the script with the TZ environment variable set to UTC, in order to run this one program in UTC.
• Set max_age to 86400 (24 hours) or higher. The max_age setting is mostly just there to keep the first run on a feed from spamming your channels. You can run once with output only to a test channel, then stop, reconfigure for real channels, and run again.

Financial Support

I have a very few costs associated with this project. I'm happy to donate my time. But if you want to thank me financially: