P0: GroupMe Bot

Due: uhhh, last day of classes?

Overview

• create a GroupMe bot that will be able to read/respond to messages in a GroupMe chat

Pre-Requisites

• python3 installed
  • see here for download
• GroupMe:
  • account, sign up here
  • bot, see how to create one here
    • you'll need an access token, it's basically just top right of the dev page
  • class GroupMe, join here

Setup

1. Fork te repo to your own account
   • on this repo, click the fork button in the top right
   • ensure that when you fork, it is public, otherwise we won't be able to see your submission
2. Set up your .env file based on your GroupMe information. You just create a file called .env to represent your environment variables. Here is a template for your .env file:

BOT_ID=""
GROUP_ID="98324520" # our GroupMe chat id
ACCESS_TOKEN="" 

• BOT_ID is the id of your bot, you can find this on the dev page
• This is file is what is loaded in bot.py via the load_dotenv() function

# clone the **forked** repo to your local machine and cd into it 
git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/p0.git && cd p0

# create virtual environment (this creates a folder called venv)
python3 -m venv venv

# activate virtual environment
source venv/bin/activate # for mac/linux
venv\Scripts\activate # for windows


# install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

To deactivate the virtual environment, run deactivate

Tasks

We have provided you with an outline of the bot in bot.py that is able to read/send messages to the GroupMe chat. Your task is to implement the following features:

• respond to you
  • you should be able to run your script and send a message in the GroupMe chat and have your bot respond to you and only you, meaning that if someone else sends the same message, even with the same name, your bot should not respond to them
    • hint: look at the sample.json that shows what other fields you can extract from a response (i.e. sender_id)
    • you can view the contents of a response itself by printing response.json().get("response", {}) located here(this is what is inside the response field of the sample.json file)
• good morning/good night
  • if anyone says good morning/good night, your bot should respond with a good morning/good night with their name
    • i.e. if someone says "good morning", your bot should respond with "good morning, "
    • think about how you're going to stop your bot from responding to itself and the other bots in the chat
    • caution: if you start spamming the chat, please ctrl+c your script to stop it
    • feel free to mute the chat, we will use piazza for any important announcements
• create 1 (or more, for extra-credit) additional features that you think would be cool
  • you may incorporate other API's (i.e. Giphy)
  • you can have the bot perhaps have tell the weather of a particular city
• create a doc (markdown, *.md file) that outlines the features of your bot, how to run it
  • please put this file in the groupme-bot folder and name it README.md
  • refer to markdown syntax here

Running

# activate virtual environment
source venv/bin/activate # for mac/linux
venv\Scripts\activate # for windows

# run bot
python3 bot.py

• you may additionally add flags that can be added to the bot.py script
  • i.e. python3 bot.py --debug should run the bot in debug mode and print out more information if something goes wrong
  • i.e. python3 bot.py --help should print out a help message that shows what flags are available
    • your TAs will appreciate this

Submission

as you complete tasks, edit this markdown file to reflect your progress. if you have completed something just put an "x" in the checkbox. here's an example:

• respond to you (not done)
• respond to you (done)

once you are done, commit your changes and push to your forked repo

# adds all files that have been changed in the current directory
git add .
# commit changes with message "completed p0" (you can change this to whatever you want)
git commit -m "completed p0"
# if this is your first time pushing, you'll need to set the upstream branch
git push --set-upstream origin main
# otherwise, you can just push
git push

then, on gradescope submit a submission.txt file that has the following contents:

username
repo

where username is your github username and repo is the name of your forked repo (i.e. p0)