AdPoster

NOTE: This code has been sanitized. I removed all references to the real site that this works with in order to prevent site from being overrun with robots.

AdPoster automates posting an ad to site. I post ads on a weekly basis to site where only the date changes. There's no RESTful api so I wrote this robot to automate posting my ad. Once posted, the URL to the ad is emailed to the account that posted it via MailGun. Why site doesn't provide this feature I don't know.

This script is set to run once a week via crontab the --day|-d option specifies the next day of the week that this ad corresponds to (it's time limited). The next date is computed and then substituted into the title of the ad which is defined in a .json config file.

At some point I plan to refactor Site and MailGunHelper into gems complete with gemspecs and defined dependencies so you wont have to install requirements manually.

• Requirements
• Configuration
• Script Invocation

---

Requirements

Watir web-driver

gem install watir-webdriver # used to simulate the browser

mailgun

gem install mailgun # used to send the email (requires an account and registered domain)

trollop

gem install trollop # an awesome command line options gem.

dotenv

gem install dotenv # loads environment vars

Configuration

AdPoster requires three configuration files, two are dotenv shims one for mailgun and one for site, the other is a .json file that contains the ad content. The path for the mailgun shim is set in an environment variable ENV['MAILGUN_ENV'], and is loaded via Dotenv.load ENV['MAILGUN_ENV'] in post_to_site.rb. Likewise, the shim for site is also defined in an environment variable, however it is loaded based on the value of account set in the .json config file. This allows for posting ads with a different set of credentials. It is loaded via Dotenv.load ENV[post_data[:account].upcase] which means you need to make sure you have an environment variable with the same name as the account for example:

.bash_profile

export FOO=/Some/Path/to/the/dotenv_file/.foo

foo.json

{
  "account": "foo",
  ...
}

Sample .json config file

The data is pretty much always the same, except the month and date. The script will replace #{month} and #{date} with date determined by the command line option --day|-d (See invocation for option details).

{
  "account": "foo",
   "title": "required: #{month}#{date} the month and date fields will be replaced with actual data",
   "body": "The Body",
   "url":  "Optional: URL to include in the ad",
   "address": {
     "address": "555 Fake Street",
     "city": "Some City",
     "state": "CA",
     "zip": "90210",
     "country": "United States"
   }
}

Sample Mailgun shim

MAILGUN_API_KEY=your_mailgun_key
MAILGUN_DOMAIN=your_mailgun_domain

Sample Account/Site shim

SITE_USERNAME=your_username
SITE_PASSWORD=your_password

Invocation

ruby post_to_site.rb --day 0-6 --config path_to_file

Options

• day, d - The day of the week that this time sensitive ad runs until.
• config, c - A .json config file containing all the data for the ad including which account to post it under.

Example Invocation

ruby post_to_site.rb -d 3 -c ~/ad_configs/wednesday_ad.json

The above will compute the date for next Wednesday, (-d 3), if run on Tuesday will return tomorrow's (Wednesday's) date, if run on Thursday, will return next Wednesday's date. The .json file is loaded, and the browser will log into account and the #{month} and #{date} will be replaced by next Wednesday and the ad is posted to site.