ilijaljubicic / facebook-news-bot Goto Github PK

This is the app behind our Facebook Messenger "bot", which is attached to the Guardian's Facebook page.

We're still in the process of working out what a messenger bot can/should do. At the moment, it can:

1. Push a "morning briefing" to users who have subscribed (taking into account their timezone).
2. Respond with a carousel of links for a requested topic. These are either the top headlines, or most popular stories.

Users can choose from one of four regional editions - UK, US, Australia and International.

The app is written in scala, and uses the akka-http library. We deploy to AWS EC2s.

A minimal amount of user data is stored in Dynamodb. Nothing we store can be used to personally identify a user - it's just general data, like their morning briefing time and edition.

To allow this app to scale horizontally, the scheduling of the morning briefings is handled separately by an AWS Lambda. The Lambda checks for users who are due to receive their morning briefings and adds them to an SQS queue, which this app polls.

Run sbt test.

The tests use sbt-dynamodb to run dynamodb locally. A dummy CAPI service reads content data from file. A mock Facebook service is used to verify that the responses are correct.

This shouldn't generally be necessary. You'll need to set up dynamodb locally and provide a local config file at ~/.configuration-magic/facebook-news-bot.properties.