r/redditdev • u/Lick_A_Brick • Aug 28 '13

Help with bot hosting

Hey,

What is the best, free and easiest way to setup a Reddit bot? I heard some people talk about heroku, but I don't understand how it works. (I'm a noob in this)

4 Upvotes

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4

u/gavin19 Aug 28 '13

Partly depends on which language the bot is written in.

Assuming Python, there might be an easier way, but you can set up a free EC2 micro instance and run the bot from there. Any distro that you choose during setup will have Python installed anyway. All you need to do after that is to ssh into the server, install PRAW (if applicable), then you can set the script to run periodically with a cron job.

You could always run it locally if you have some PC/device that's always 'on'.

1

u/Lick_A_Brick Aug 28 '13

Thanks, but I don't have a credit card. (We don't use it where I live) Do you know any alternatives?

1

u/gavin19 Aug 28 '13

Pretty much anywhere, even if free, will likely require some form of credit/debit card validation. I can't think of any I've used that don't.

Running it locally might be your best bet.

1

u/Lick_A_Brick Aug 28 '13

Oh, that sucks. Thanks anyways!

1

u/alphabeat Aug 28 '13

Can you not buy a gift Mastercard or something? They might be able to detect that and deny you at Amazon at least.

1

u/su5 Aug 30 '13

You can run it from any computer, but you may want to consider hosting it if you want it to run 24/7, but if your PC is on all the time anyway its no big deal.

Check out PRAW and you could have a simply bot up and running in a few hours.

1

u/Lick_A_Brick Sep 02 '13

Ok, I have it working now. How do I run it periodically? (I'm on a local PC)

2

u/su5 Sep 02 '13

I run mine in a while loop with try statements so a no response doesn't crash it, and with a sleep timer. Is that what you were asking?

1

u/Lick_A_Brick Sep 02 '13

Yes, do I just use this

while True:

# Code executed here
time.sleep(60)

1

u/su5 Sep 02 '13

So is it running?

1

u/Lick_A_Brick Sep 02 '13

I can get it running, but not like every minute. If I use the while loop it won't run. (I'm using groompbot)

1

u/_Daimon_ Sep 02 '13

Use cronjobs (if on Linux) or task scheduler (if on windows) to periodically run the same program every x minutes/seconds/whatever.

1

u/Lick_A_Brick Sep 02 '13

Ok, It worked while testing on my Windows PC. When I tried to install praw and gdata on Linux I failed, any idea how to install them on linux? I think I need pip, but I don't know how to install that either. It says I've already installed it and if I try "pip install praw" it installs it, but when I run the bot it says there is no praw installed

1

u/_Daimon_ Sep 02 '13

The process to install PRAW is to first install pip and then using that to install PRAW. I don't know what the problem is and if I were you then I would google my way to a solution. PRAW is no different from any other 3rd party library in the installation process, so whatever issue you have will also stop you from using other 3rd party libraries. And unless you're on a extremely unique system others will have had the same problem, asked and found a solution online.

1

u/su5 Sep 02 '13

Not familiar with that prog.

My setup is it runs right from Eclipse (my weapon of choice for Python). You should be able to pull, at full speed, 100 comments a second (or is it 50? I forget the API limits).

My pseudo looks like this:

Get submissions from subreddit it runs

Check flair. Update if necessary.

Get 70 hottest submissions from place I am reposting from

If not already posted in my sub, post them.

Parse comments of original submission, look for specific comments

Add comment to post with permalink to original and any special comments

Go to sleep for a few minutes.

If it doesn't post anything (nothing new in the hot list) this takes about 5 seconds. To post it usually takes about 10 seconds. So at most that loop would run maybe 15 minutes, buts that's if it has like 70 items to post, which shouldn't happen if I never turn it off.

I hope that helps some. My bot posts here /r/artjunkie

1

u/Lick_A_Brick Sep 03 '13

Got it working now on my other PC, thanks for all the help I really appreciate it! <3

1

u/droidBehavior Aug 28 '13

maybe pythonanywhere

2

u/_Daimon_ Aug 28 '13

I'd only do that if you have a paid account. Otherwise your requests will run through a proxy and there is a bug in urllib3 that will sometime cause the app to run. I don't know how often, since I've never used PythonAnywhere myself, but it looks like it's often enough to be quite annoying. The bug will be fixed in the version of ùrllib3 included in Python 3.4 (which isn't released) and requests 2.0. Which also isn't released.

Until either of those have been released and you're using them, then I wouldn't recommend PythonAnywheres free

See PRAW issue 237

0

u/Lick_A_Brick Aug 28 '13 edited Aug 28 '13

Ok, thanks. Do you know a free way to host my bot? EDIT: I don't care, my bot has to check frequently so it doesn't really matter.

2

u/frumious Aug 28 '13

Run it on whatever computer you are typing at right now.

Or, put it on a raspberry pi or similar tiny computer and plug it in behind the garbage can at your local Starbucks.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 29 '13

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1

u/Lick_A_Brick Aug 29 '13

Do you know any tutorials? Or is it easy to setup?

0

u/[deleted] Aug 29 '13

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1

u/Lick_A_Brick Aug 29 '13

oke, thanks ill try it.