Node JS Jokebot

December 13, 2023

Learning Node JS

I’ve started playing about with Node JS to learn it enough to modify some legacy Lambda code.

One of the tasks I set myself was to write a Joke bot for Mastodon, which work out to be fairly easy with a couple of packages got and masto.

Dad Joke Bot the code is only 32 lines long, looking to expand it to be able to post images as well.

import { createRestAPIClient } from "masto";
import got from "got";

function getJoke(apiUrl){
  got.get(apiUrl, { responseType: 'json' })
    .then(response => {
                  // If the request is successful, parse the response body as a JSON object
                  const data = response.body;
                        // console.log("Data Response,",data);
                        post(data.joke);
                            })
    .catch(error => {
                  // If the request fails, print out the error message
                  console.error(error.message);
                    });
}

async function post(myJoke){
  const newStatus = myJoke + " #dadjoke"
  console.log("Post Joke,",myJoke);
  const masto = createRestAPIClient({
              url: process.env.URL,
                  accessToken: process.env.TOKEN,
                    });
  const status = await masto.v1.statuses.create({
              status: newStatus,
                  visibility: "public",
                    });
  console.log(status.url);
}

getJoke("https://icanhazdadjoke.com/");

The resulting posts end up here, https://mastodon.me.uk/@dadjokes, I ended up running it via a Dockaer image with crontab.

Alastair Montgomery Dec 2023