Bikozulu Bot

A Node.js application that scraps posts off of Bikozulu's blog and sends them to users subscribed to a Telegram bot.

Table of contents

• Getting started
• Prerequisites
• Installing
• Running the app
  • Running the web scraper
  • Running cloud functions
• Deployment
• Built With
• Authors
• License
• Acknowledgments

Bikozulu Bot

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

You will need these to run and set up the app

• A firebase account.
• Node.js installed on your PC

Installing

1. Clone or download the repo from this url and extract it.

2. Open your console and change into that directory

   cd javascript-web-scraper/
   

3. List the contents of the directory.

   ls
   

4. You should have such a directory structure

   javascript-web-scraper/
   └── functions/
   │   ├── index.js
   │   │── ...
   │   │── ...
   │   └── package.json
   |── firebase.json           
   |── .gitignore
   |── firestore.rules           
   |── ...
   |── ...     
   |── index.js
   └── package.json
   

5. Install the required modules

   npm install
   

6. Install the required modules for cloud functions

   cd functions/
   npm install 
   

7. Create a .env file at the root of your directory and add the following variables:

    API_KEY: "",
    AUTH_DOMAIN: "",
    DATABASE_URL: "",
    PROJECT_ID: "",
    STORAGE_BUCKET: "",
    MESSAGING_SENDING_ID: "",
    APP_ID: "",
    MEASUREMENT_ID: ""
   

8. Sign into your console and open the app you created. Get the config object for your web app and copy-paste the details into the respective fields in yout .env file. Follow this tutorial if you have trouble getting them.

9. Retrieve your Javascript SDK for firebase and copy it to the root of your project. Use this tutorial.

10. Rename the firebase admin credentials that you have just downloaded to firebase-adminsdk.json

Running the app

The app is split into two parts;

• A web scraping application that scraps data and stores it in Cloud firestore
• Cloud functions that are triggered and run when updating the Telegram bot.

Running the web scraper

1. From the root(/) directory, run

   npm run start
   

2. You should see such a screen

Yaay! It works.

Running cloud functions

1. Navigate into your functions/ directory

   cd functions/
   

2. Run

   npm run serve
   

That's it

Deployment

1. cd into the root / directory

   # If you are in the functions directory
   cd ../
   

2. run

   firebase deploy
   

Built With

• Nuxt - Web framework
• Firebase - Cloud functions, storage, auth
• Telegram - Bot platform

Contributing

Currently accepting pull requests.

Authors

• Lewis Munyi - Dev - Website

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details

Acknowledgments

• Hat tip to anyone whose code was used
• Photo by ray rui on Unsplash

Enjoy 🤘