Comicbot!

Go program that goes out to the Teknisk Ukeblad web and downloads todays Lunch and Dunce cartoons, and Dilbert - while supplies last[1] - then sends the URL to your Slack channel. The cartoons are in Norwegian.

New! Also supports downloading XKCD - will use a key/value pair at kvdb.io to track the last comic that was downloaded, and only download newer ones.

The original idea is mine, but I have used various resources in implementing the solution. Learning Go along the way.

You should probably avoid spamming the tu.no website, as they might react with breaking changes.

[1] Dilbert was cancelled following the Scott Adams controversy.

Prerequisites

1. Get your Slack Incoming Webhook URL set up.
2. Set up your kvdb.io bucket, ie like this curl -d 'email=user@example.com' https://kvdb.io
3. Install Golang. Or just run the bot in a Github workflow. See .github/workflows for examples.
4. Set environment variable as below, or in a .env file for automatic inclusion:

WEBHOOK_URL="https://hooks.slack.com/services/THIS/IS/PRIVATE"
KVDB_BUCKET="yourBucketId"

5. Set a key in your KVDB bucket to the comic id of the XKCD comic you want to start tracking from. As of this writing the current comic is 2752.

   curl https://kvdb.io/yourBucketId/xkcd -d '2752'

6. Run the bot with go run .

This should download the images of the current comics to pwd, and post their URLs to Slack.

Building and running with Docker

1. Build the image docker build --tag comicbot .
2. Run the container docker run --env WEBHOOK_URL="<your-slack-webhook-url>" comicbot

Building and publishing to Dockerhub

First login to Dockerhub with docker login

1. Build the image and tag appropriately docker build --tag <repository>/comicbot:latest .
2. Push the image to the repository docker push <repository>/comicbot:latest