Robb. Knight.

So, I am converting every line of dialog of Office Space into a .gif. If that was to be a Mastobot, is that something you might be able to give some pointers on in the future?

This was a message I got from Jason seven weeks ago. Jason then spent the next 28 hours converting Office Space into just over 1000 gifs and sent them to me so I could get to work on the bot code itself.

Jason wrote a post about how he converted the movies to gifs and the adventure he went on trying to find an instance to host it. He also set up a page to show a gif on each load if you're into that sort of thing.

I started by modifying the code I wrote for KnightBot which runs my bots on Bugle. A bot for posting gifs has three parts to it:

1. Pick a random gif from a list
2. Check if that gif has been posted before
3. Post it to Mastodon

To pick a random gif the first thing I needed to do was setup the file structure for the script:

├── data/
│   └── officespace_gifs/
├── index.js
└── .env

I wanted this to be able to work for multiple bots so the prefix of officespace is important on the officespace_gifs folder - this is the bot key used to run the script: node index.js officespace. The .env file contains INSTANCE, the instance we're posting to and officespace_TOKEN which is the access token for Mastodon. This also uses the bot key.

The index.js file sets the current path (so the script can be run from anywhere), checks for a matching bot (in this case, officespace), then checks for a .previous file. This file is what keeps track of which gifs have been posted previously. If one doesn't exist, it will create it:

import fs from 'fs'
import postToMastodon from './poster.js'

const bots = [
    'officespace'
]

const currentPath = process.argv[1].replace('index.js', '')

const getPreviousData = (botKey) => {
    const previousPath = `${currentPath}data/${botKey}.previous`
    const previousDataExists = fs.existsSync(previousPath)

    if (!previousDataExists)
    {
        console.log('🗒️ Making previous file')
        fs.writeFileSync(previousPath, '')
    }

    return fs.readFileSync(previousPath, 'utf8')
}

const run = async () => {
    const botKey = process.argv[2]

    if (!botKey) {
        console.log('❌ You must pass a bot key')
        return
    }

    if (!bots.includes(botKey))
    {
        console.log('❌ No bot found')
        return
    }

    let previous = getPreviousData(botKey)

    // ...
}

Once I have the previous data, I get a list of the gifs from officespace_gifs, pick a random one, then check if it's already been posted: if it has, I pick a new one until I get one that hasn't and add it to the .previous file.

let previous = getPreviousData(botKey)

const gifs = fs.readdirSync(`${currentPath}data/${botKey}_gifs`)

let found = gifs[Math.floor(Math.random() * gifs.length)]

while (previous.includes(found))
{
    found = gifs[Math.floor(Math.random() * gifs.length)]
}

previous += `\n${found}`

fs.writeFileSync(`${currentPath}data/${botKey}.previous`, previous)

await postToMastodon(botKey, `${currentPath}data/${botKey}_gifs/${found}`)

Now I have a gif, I use the masto library to post it to Mastodon:

import fs from 'fs'
import { createRestAPIClient } from 'masto'
import dotenv from 'dotenv'
dotenv.config()

export default async (botKey, filepath, description) => {
    const masto = createRestAPIClient({
        url: process.env.INSTANCE,
        accessToken: process.env[`${botKey}_TOKEN`],
    })

    const attachment = await masto.v2.media.create({
        file: new Blob([fs.readFileSync(filepath)]),
        description: description,
    })

    const status = await masto.v1.statuses.create({
        status: '',
        visibility: "public",
        mediaIds: [attachment.id],
    })

    return status
}

I handed the code over to Jason, he ran it, and hey presto we had the first toot.

Since then, Jason kindly ran his script on Back to the Future, my favourite movie of all time, so I could set up @greatscott to do the same thing. Since last night, he also has a Matrix one too. He cannot be stopped.

You can follow @initech, @greatscott, and @zion on Mastodon and the code for GifBot is on Github.