A bot that tweets sortes vergilianae, but with owls.

This bot visits the Aeneid API's sortes address to find a prophetic saying. Then it uses the NLTK to find the first noun in the phrase and replaces it with the word 'owl'.

Why? Because I think the result is funny, and as informative as any other astrology bot you might want to consult.

The Sortes Virgilianae were a way of telling fortunes or answering questions by flipping to a random page of the Aeneid. If you don't believe me you can check the arbiter of internet truth, Wikipedia. The Romans also practiced augury by birdwatching, so I thought the owl was in keeping with the general theme, in addition to being entertaining.

• add Latin owl tweets (need to upload CLTK to heroku for this)
• add reply functionality so you can get a personal response
• probably add emoji or something so it won't try to tweet the same things twice

Well, that was as exciting as I expected. Here's what didn't work:

1. Using any Python install method from within the post_compile hook (method suggested here for NLTK before it was included automagically in Heroku). When the hook ran during deployment, the console said it was downloading the data, but after all was said and done there was not a trace of the cltk_data folder anywhere in the Heroku repo. Fun!

Interestingly, if I used the individual Python commands from within the heroku run bash Python shell, everything installed just fine. If I created a separate Python install script file and ran it from the bash shell, it also worked just fine. Trying to do any of that from the post_compile hook? So much nope.

2. Running a Python install script from Heroku's CLI. That is, using my local terminal and running heroku run python my_install_script.py. Said it was running, but when I went back into the shell, no folder. Still more nope!

As it turns out, there's an explanation and fix hidden in the "1 more comment" of the SO answer above; the latest version of the buildpack doesn't include data downloaded unless it's into the current working directory, not '/app', and you can't tell CLTK where to load its data, so, back to the drawing board.

3. Flat-out copying the compiled cltk_data folders into the repo. (Yes, I know.) When I uploaded the entire compiled cltk_data folder to Heroku, all subfolders under model disappeared. Again, if I ran the Python install commands from the Heroku bash shell, or I used git to clone them from within bash, the subfolders would populate correctly.

Here's what worked:

1. Using git in the post_compile script to clone the CLTK models data. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I manually recreated the folder structure that cltk expects, and added it to the path in my main file, and that worked too.

My suspicion is that the pre-compile/upload issues have to do with write permissions or some such, but figuring that out is above my current pay grade. Better yet, someone who's getting paid can add CLTK to the Python buildpack! But definitely not me!