Journal Club Slacker

Monitor RSS Feeds and send a Slack message with a link to ones that contain predefined keywords. Uses a sqlite3 database to track articles that have already been sent.

Requirements

• Python3.8
• libraries in Pipfile

Setup

1. Create SlackBot via instructions in Step 1 here. Copy the OAuth Access Token.
2. Copy the sample.env file to a .env file and update the SLACK_TOKEN and CHANNEL variables
3. Add tab-delimited Titles and Feed RSS URLs to your feeds.txt file and keywords to your keywords.txt file.

Usage

python3 parseFeeds.py

Optionally, you can set up a crontab to run this every day at a specified time. The feeds and keywords files can also be passed on the command-line, overriding the environment variables like so:

python3 parseFeeds.py --feeds <feeds_file> --keywords <keywords_file>

Credit

Thanks to tutorials:

• https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-build-a-slackbot-in-python-on-ubuntu-20-04
• https://fedoramagazine.org/never-miss-magazines-article-build-rss-notification-system

Troubleshooting

If you run into a problem with the code, feel free to raise an issue or submit a PR.

Tasks

• More refined keyword parsing
• Retrieve and scan article text
• Ranking of articles based on keyword hits
• Condensed option for messages
• Tag people when specific keywords seen