andreipoe/comics-mailer repository overview

⁠Comics Mailer

A python script that notifies you via email whenever your favourite comics are released.

⁠Installation

Clone this repository using git.

⁠Dependencies

Comics Mailer uses python3 and you can install it using pip3:

pip3 install comics-mailer

Alternatively, you can clone this repository and install the dependcies manually using:

git clone https://github.com/andreipoe/comics-mailer.git
pip3 install --upgrade feedparser beautifulsoup4 requests

⁠Configuration

Before you can use Comics Mailer, you need to configure it. This is done thorugh two main files:

• $HOME/.config/comics-mailer/params.cfg is an ini-like configuration file that contains the Mailgun API key and domain used to send emails. See params.cfg.template in this repo for the paramters you need to configure, or run with --setup for an interactive process.
• $HOME/.config/comics-mailer/watchlist.lst is the list of comics for which you want to receive alerts. Enter a (partial) title on each line; blank lines and lines starting with # are ignored, and the matching is case-insensitive.

⁠Usage

The suggested way to run Comics Mailer is to use schedule a weekly cron job for it. See man crontab if you haven't used cron before.

To run the script every Wednesday at 6 pm, you would use the following job:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
  0 18 *   *    3    /path/to/comics_mailer.py

Important: Make sure you have set up your installation as described in the Configuration section⁠. The script will not work unless all the settings are in place.

⁠Running in Docker

You can run Comics Mailer in a Docker container. To do this, first obtain the image from DockerHub:

docker pull andreipoe/comics-mailer

... or build it yourself:

docker build -t andreipoe/comics-mailer .

Then, set up two directories to hold the application data, for example:

mkdir -p /docker-data/comics-mailer/{data,config}

Next, set up your configuration as described above and place the relevant files in the config folder you have just created. As an alternative, you can run a one-off container to guide you through the setup process.

docker run -it --rm -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/data:/comics-mailer/data -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/config:/comics-mailer/config andreipoe/comics-mailer --setup

Finally, run the container using your data folders (if you've used the setup container, make sure you use the same data folders in both):

docker run -d --name comics-mailer --restart unless-stopped -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/data:/comics-mailer/data -v /docker-data/comics-mailer/config:/comics-mailer/config andreipoe/comics-mailer

By default, the application inside the container runs at 6 PM every Wednesday. To override the schedule, set the CRON envrionment variable in the container to a valid cron string. For example, to run every day at 10 PM you would set -e CRON='0 22 * * *' in your docker run command (don't forget the quotes, otherwise your shell might try to expand the wildcards).

You will be able to see the application's progress through the last_run.log file in the data volume.

⁠Credits

Comics Mailer uses data from the awesome comics release lists at ComicList⁠ and sends emails through the dead-simple Mailgun⁠ service. This script is made possible by the BeatifulSoup⁠ and the feedparser⁠ libraries.