comics-mailer 1.0.0

A comic release notifier using Mailgun.

A python script that notifies you via email whenever your favourite comics are released.

Installation

Clone this repository using git.

Dependencies

Comics Mailer uses python3 and you can install it using pip3:

pip3 install comics-mailer

Alternatively, you can clone this repository and install the dependcies manually using:

git clone https://github.com/andreipoe/comics-mailer.git
pip3 install --upgrade feedparser beautifulsoup4 requests

Configuration

Before you can use Comics Mailer, you need to configure it. This is done thorugh two main files:

• $HOME/.config/comics-mailer/params.cfg is an ini-like configuration file that contains the Mailgun API key and domain used to send emails. See params.cfg.template in this repo for the paramters you need to configure, or run with --setup for an interactive process.

• $HOME/.config/comics-mailer/watchlist.lst is the list of comics for which you want to receive alerts. Enter a (partial) title on each line; blank lines and lines starting with # are ignored, and the matching is case-insensitive.

Usage

The suggested way to run Comics Mailer is to use schedule a weekly cron job for it. See man crontab if you haven’t used cron before.

To run the script every Wednesday at 6 pm, you would use the following job:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
  0 18 *   *    3    /path/to/comics_mailer.py

Important: Make sure you have set up your installation as described in the Configuration section. The script will not work unless all the settings are in place.

Running in Docker

You can run Comics Mailer in a Docker container. To do this, first obtain the image from DockerHub:

docker pull andreipoe/comics-mailer

… or build it yourself:

docker build -t andreipoe/comics-mailer .

Then, set up two directories to hold the application data, for example:

mkdir -p /docker-data/comics-mailer/{data,config}

Next, set up your configuration as described above and place the relevant files in the config folder you have just created. As an alternative, you can run a one-off container to guide you through the setup process.

docker run -it --rm -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/data:/comics-mailer/data -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/config:/comics-mailer/config andreipoe/comics-mailer --setup

Finally, run the container using your data folders (if you’ve used the setup container, make sure you use the same data folders in both):

docker run -d --name comics-mailer --restart unless-stopped -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/data:/comics-mailer/data -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/config:/comics-mailer/config andreipoe/comics-mailer

By default, the application inside the container runs at 6 PM every Wednesday. To override the schedule, set the CRON envrionment variable in the container to a valid cron string. For example, to run every day at 10 PM you would set -e CRON='0 22 * * *' in your docker run command (don’t forget the quotes, otherwise your shell might try to expand the wildcards).

You will be able to see the application’s progress through the last_run.log file in the data volume.

Credits

Comics Mailer uses data from the awesome comics release lists at ComicList and sends emails through the dead-simple Mailgun service. This script is made possible by the BeatifulSoup and the feedparser libraries.