Magic: The GIFening

A Twitter bot which tweets Magic: the Gathering cards with appropriate GIFs superimposed onto them. Made in Python using the GIPHY API and MoviePy.

You can see the bot in action at the Twitter account @MTGIFening.

Some highlights:

• Vendetta
• Sudden Shock
• Metamorphosis
• Constant Mists
• Screaming Fury

In order to tweet on a regular schedule, the Dockerfile contains a cronjob which runs the script at the specified interval of time (currently set at 4 times a day/every 6 hours).

Usage

First, create a secrets.py with the appropriate GIPHY and Twitter API Keys:

GIPHY_API_KEY = '<FILL IN>'
CONSUMER_KEY = '<FILL IN>'
CONSUMER_SECRET = '<FILL IN>'
ACCESS_KEY = '<FILL IN>'
ACCESS_SECRET = '<FILL IN>'

The current list of cards used to generate images is derived from cards.csv. If you want to update the list, use get_cardlist.py and the AllSets.json file from MTG JSON.

Then run mtgifening.py and it should save and tweet a random GIF!

To run as a Twitter bot on the schedule, after you've added your secrets.py file, build the Docker container. Then run the container in detached mode, starting it up using /sbin/my_init:

docker run --rm -d magic /sbin/my_init

Notes

• The files generated are actually videos, not proper GIFs. Videos are created much faster, take less disk space, and on Twitter, functionally identical to GIFs (videos less than 6 seconds will also autoloop).

Requirements

moviepy, ffmpeg, twython, Pillow

Maintainer/Creator

Max Woolf (@minimaxir)

Max's open-source projects are supported by his Patreon. If you found this project helpful, any monetary contributions to the Patreon are appreciated and will be put to good creative use.

License

MIT