Keys to the Kingdom

You’ll need to get API keys from community.lsst.org and Mandrill. Set them to the following environment variables:

• $MANDRILL_KEY (note, use the API key for the community_mailbot subaccount)

• $DISCOURSE_KEY (the Discourse key should correspond to a user with sufficient permissions)

• $DISCOURSE_USER

Optionally set $COMMUNITY_MAILBOT_CACHE to the location where you want the Mailbot to keep track of its topics it has forwarded.

Setup Topic → Email Mapping

To setup how Discourse categories are mapped to recipient email addresses, you need to know the integer IDs for each relevant category. To get these, run the included script:

discourse_categories

If you set the aforementioned environment variables, you won’t need to provide any arguments to the script.

Next, create a config.json file. It’s a simple hash structure; each key-value pair is the Discourse category ID and a list of email recipients for that category. The general format is:

{
    "<id>": [{"email": "<email address>",
              "name": "<recipient name>",
              "type": "to"}],
}

The structure of the dict in the value matches the Mandrill send-template API. The "type" field should typically be "to", but could also be "cc" or "bcc".

Note that since the recipient information for each category is a list, you can have multiple recipients.

Pre-cache old topics

Before having the bot send emails, you’ll want it to know about and ignore older messages. To warm up the cache, we’ll run the forward_discourse script with the --cache-only option.

forward_discourse config.json --cache-only

Note that forward_discourse can configure itself with the environment variables you’ve already setup. Run forward_discourse --help for the full set of options.

Set up a cron schedule

The bot works best when it regularly monitors a Discourse site for new topics. cron is a great way to set this up.

It’s useful to create a shell script to contain all of the script arguments. For example, create a script called run_mailbot.sh:

#!/bin/bash
source /home/ec2-user/.bash_profile
source activate community_mailbot
forward_discourse /home/ec2-user/config.json

echo "$(date) Ran forward_discourse"

This script sets up up the shell environment, loads a Python environment, and then runs the mailbot.

Then instruct cron to run this script every 10 minutes

First, open the crontab in your terminal

crontab -e

And add a line for the bot

*/10 * * * * /home/ec2-user/run_mailbot.sh

Then sit back and watch the email flow.