You'll want to cd into the package directory and then run zip -r.Then you need to install the dependencies:.Change the rss_feed = to be whatever feed you want to make a bot of.Copy that snippet to a directory and call it lambda_function.py.Make sure you have Python 3.9 installed (since AWS doesn't support 3.10).Wanna use UUIDs? Go for it.įor those who haven't deployed to AWS Lambda before, it's pretty easy. So please, for the love of all things holy, don't ping me. Before you ping me about collision, I calculate that with that big a range of random IDs to pull from it would take ~6 thousands of years of work in order to have a 1% probability of at least one collision. Were this a work project I would have changed some things about its design. NOTE: This is not production-grade python. I've allocated 5 provisioned Read and Write units but honestly we need a tiny fraction of that. Now that I've spent some time playing around with DynamoDB, I do see the appeal. The difference in speed during load testing when I generated a lot of fake URLs was pretty dramatic, 100s of milliseconds vs 10s of seconds. Query is what I ended up using for all my requests, since then I get to make lookups on my secondary tables with the key. When using DynamoDB, it is vital to not use scan. I ended up storing the ID as a string which is probably not optimal performance but did make the error go away. You can read the conversation about it here. This can cause some strange errors when attempting to store and retrieve ID values. Because of how DynamoDB stores numbers, the type of the number is Decimal, not int or float. You can see the simple table structure I made here. To be honest I ran into more problems than I was expecting given its reputation as an idiot-proof database. I'm still not entirely sure I used it correctly. I've never used dynamoDB before, so I figured this could be a fun challenge. Runs entirely within the free tier of AWS.While this would be very easy to do with SQLite, I wanted it to be an AWS Lambda so it wouldn't rely on some raspberry pi being functional (or me remembering that it was running on some instance and then accidentally terminating it because I love to delete servers). Finding a derelict Ars Technica bot, I figured why not take this opportunity to make a bot of my own. These accounts, for folks who don't know, tend to do things like scrape RSS feeds and pump that information into Twitter so you can have everything in one pane of glass. However when I got on Mastodon I found a lot of abandoned bot accounts. It's a super nice community and I have a lot of hope for the ActivityPub model.

I won't go into Mastodon except to say I've moved over there as well ) and have really enjoyed myself. With the recent exodus from Twitter due to Elon being a deranged sociopath, many folks have found themselves moving over to Mastodon.

Mastodon rss bot python