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Hacker News Bot

This is a simple Python script for a Discord and Slack bot, designed to fetch the latest news from Hacker News (HN) and post it to a specified Discord/Slack channel via webhooks. The bot is optimized for Docker deployment, offers different data storages (local files or SQLite) to track which news stories have been posted.

How It Works

  1. Fetches the top X news stories, from Hacker News top stories API, at a regular interval.
  2. Checks against a stored list of already-posted stories, individually for Discord and Slack and if a story is not in the list, it is considered new, otherwise, bot tries to find next new story.
  3. Post these new stories to the Discord/Slack channel linked through the provided webhook URL.

Running Locally

To run the bot locally, you will need either Python directly or Docker for containerized deployment.

Running with Docker

docker run
    -e DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL="your_webhook_url_here"
    -e SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL="your_webhook_url_here"
    -e SCHEDULE_PERIOD=60
    -e FETCH_TOP_STORIES_AMOUNT=5
    -e STORAGE=local
    jibla/hn-bot

Environment Variables

  • DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL: The webhook URL for the Discord channel where news will be posted.
  • SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: The webhook URL for the Slack channel where news will be posted.
  • SCHEDULE_PERIOD: The frequency (in minutes) at which the bot fetches and posts news.
  • FETCH_TOP_STORIES_AMOUNT: The number of top stories the bot should fetch and attempt to post at each interval.
  • STORAGE: Specifies the method for tracking posted stories (local for file storage, database for SQLite).

You can also build it from source using the Dockerfile:

docker build -t hn-bot .

Running with Python

  1. Install Dependencies:
pip install requests schedule sqlite3
  1. Set the required environment variables in your terminal:
export DISCORD_WEBHOOK_URL="your_webhook_url_here"
export SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL="your_webhook_url_here"
export SCHEDULE_PERIOD=60
export FETCH_TOP_STORIES_AMOUNT=5
export STORAGE=local  # Or 'database'
  1. Run the script:
python hn_bot.py