Soccer Bot

A GroupMe bot for auto posting upcoming soccer matches in a chat

Made to work with api.football-data.org for data on the english premier league, but can be expanded to other competitions covered by the api. Works as a command line interface or serverless service.

Quick Start

• Make sure all dependencies are installed with npm install
• Create a .env in the root of the project and include variables from .env.example. A bot id can be generated from the groupme dev site. A key for the football api can be found at api.football-data.org
  • Using multiple competitions: include two or more urls to api.football-data.org separated by commas (no spaces). Ex: FOOTBALL_API_URL="https://api.football-data.org/v1/competitions/426/fixtures,https://api.football-data.org/v1/competitions/430/fixtures"
• Start mongodb and specify a MONGODB_URI key in .env
• Do a first time setup with node bot.js setup
• Run the bot with node bot.js run

Commands

• node bot.js run looks for upcoming matches and posts them to the group chat
• node bot.js setup is a first time command to get a most up to date fixture list for the local database
• node bot.js update updates the dates in the local database to that of the dates in the football api (for fixtures that have a date/time change since node bot.js setup was called)
• node bot.js clean removes everything in the local database
• node bot.js list -h [name] -a [name] finds and lists out those fixtures from the local database. Each option is optional. Given no options, every fixture will be listed

On Production

Make sure NODE_ENV="production" in the .env.

Logging

Logging on production logs to logger.log. In addition, all errors on production will be emailed. See .env.example for example setup with a smtp host (ex: mailgun) and copy these to .env for usage.

Cron Jobs

To automatically update the fixture list every day and look for matches to be posted in groupme all the time, a cron job can be used. A sample cron job to update every night and check for matches every five minutes:

0 0 * * * node bot.js update >/dev/null 2>&1
*/5 * * * * node bot.js run >/dev/null 2>&1

Serverless Service

handler.js is ready for serverless functionality with soccer-bot. Install serverless with npm install -g serverless. Use serverless deploy --aws-profile [PROFILE] to deploy (where [PROFILE] is your aws profile). See the serverless cheat sheet for quick, useful commands.

Example commands:

• Deploy: serverless deploy --aws-profile [PROFILE]
• Deploy individual function: serverless deploy function -f [FUNCTION NAME] -s [STAGE NAME] -r [REGION NAME] --aws-profile [PROFILE]
• Clean fixtures: serverless invoke -f clean -s [STAGE] -r [REGION] -l --aws-profile [PROFILE]
• Setup fixtures: serverless invoke -f setup -s [STAGE] -r [REGION] -l --aws-profile [PROFILE]

Like the cli, the serverless service requires a MongoDB connection string in the MONGODB_URI environment variable.

Tests

Make sure dev packages are installed with npm install --dev. Run tests with npm test.

To test the app with a specific date, simply set a date for CUSTOM_DATE in your .env equal to some unix timestamp. An example of this CUSTOM_DATE environment variable can be found in .env.example. To run with a specific date, use node bot.js run --dev.

License

MIT License