Quote/Trivia and Cat Messenger

This is a dumb program that uses golang to fetch the quote of the day from http://quote.rest/ as well as some trivia from API Ninjas and then uses twilio to send it to my phone. The real value of it is that it's a simple thing that can be served up via k8s in a cronjob.

Starting in v0.10, I added the CatAPI as bonus picture inside the message. Starting in v1.0, I added the Dog API to show on Fridays, as well as added support for way more cats via filetypes supported natively by Twilio. As of v2.0, I've integrated into the awesome service ntfy.sh for quick notifications on my phone if there are any errors. As of v2.0.10, Trivia Tuesday is implemented.

Requirements

1. Go v1.19+
2. Working Kubernetes Cluster w/ the SealedSecrets CRD installed
3. Twilio Subscription and API Key
4. Quote API Key
5. Cat API Key
6. API Ninja Key
7. (optional) ntfy.sh for error reporting
8. (optional) a prometheus pushgateway instance

Configuration

Configure the following environment variables in ops/*/cronJob.yml to suit your needs:

1. TZ - your time zone
2. (if error reporting) ERR_NOTIFICATION_TOPIC - your ntfy topic
3. (if not error reporting) ERROR_REPORT_ENABLED - set to false
4. (if not pushing to prometheus) PUSH_TO_PROMETHEUS - set to false
5. (if pushing to prometheus) PROMETHEUS_GATEWAY_URI - where your prometheus push gateway listens

Building

go build

Testing

go test -v ./...

K8s

The real value of this is deploying it to kubernetes as a cronjob and then looking to add prometheus push gateway metrics.

Kustomization

This was my first foray into kustomizing. I created a base, overlay, and two separate secrets such that deployment of all resources can be done together as well as having separate sealed secrets (in this case, phone numbers) for dev and prod.

Gotchas with SealedSecrets and Kustomization

Because SealedSecrets use the name and namespace and all other data about the secret to create the hash, you have to make a complete replica of the secret using the "-dev" suffix, but then set the kustomization selector to the original label of the secrets.

Applying with Kustomize

dev: kubectl apply -k ops/overlays/dev

prod: kubectl apply -k ops/base

Secrets

The phone numbers to text, the cat api key (get yours here) as well as the twilio api key are obscured as secrets. Set them as environment variables for local testing:

TWILIO_AUTH=api-key CAT_API_KEY=api-key PHONE_NUMBERS=+16666666666,+16666666666 go run .

If you want to test locally with error reporting and prometheus metrics, it's a bit more involved:

TWILIO_AUTH=api-key \
  PHONE_NUMBERS=+16666666666 \
  CAT_API_KEY=api-key \
  QUOTE_API_KEY=api-key \
  API_NINJA_KEY=api-key \
  ERROR_REPORT_ENABLED=true \
  ERR_NOTIFICATION_TOPIC=your_topic \
  PUSH_TO_PROMETHEUS=true \
  PROMETHEUS_GATEWAY_URI=your_gateway_uri \
  go run .

Adding New Phone Numbers

Using kubeseal and SealedSecrets, you can add new phone numbers:

$ kubectl create secret generic phone-numbers -n quotes --from-literal=numbers=+15555555555,+16666666666 --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubeseal --format=yaml -
apiVersion: bitnami.com/v1alpha1
kind: SealedSecret
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: null
  name: phone-numbers
  namespace: quotes
spec:
  encryptedData:
    numbers: 
    <gibberish>
  template:
    metadata:
      creationTimestamp: null
      name: phone-numbers
      namespace: quotes

Then apply that to your cluster.

Vanilla Deployment

I had previously deployed this to my kubernetes cluster on a bunch of raspberry pis. However, they've recently stopped working and are impossible to buy new ones. So I bit the bullet and used Google Cloud Free Tier to host a non-containerized, old-school binary that can be easily scp'd into the VM.

In order to replicate that, deploy an Ubunutu VM to GCP (or your cloud provider of choice), and give yourself the ability to SSH into it via an SSH Keypair. Once you've got that, and the external IP of the VM, update your .env file with:

• twilio API key
• cat API key
• Quote API Key
• API Ninja Key
• phone numbers to text
• (OPTIONALLY) error reporting stuff
• (OPTIONALLY) prometheus things
• REMOTE_MACHINE_IP = your VMs IP
• USER_DIR = your users home directory

then run make deploy

$ make deploy
mkdir -p ./vanilla_deploy/tmp
cat ./vanilla_deploy/env.template \
		... a bunch of juicy stuff ...
scp ./vanilla_deploy/startup.sh REMOTE_IP:/home/Ubuntu/startup.sh
scp ./vanilla_deploy/tmp/.env REMOTE_IP:/home/Ubuntu/.env
ssh REMOTE_IP /home/Ubuntu/startup.sh
Hit:1 http://us-west1.gce.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Get:2 http://us-west1.gce.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease [88.7 kB]
Get:3 http://us-west1.gce.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease [83.3 kB]
Hit:4 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease
Fetched 172 kB in 1s (232 kB/s)
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
5 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Package 'golang-go' is not installed, so not removed
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  golang-1.10-go golang-1.10-race-detector-runtime golang-1.10-src
  golang-race-detector-runtime golang-src libnuma1 pkg-config
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
go mod download
mkdir ./dist
go build -o ./dist/quoteCats
rm -rf ./vanilla_deploy/tmp

This command will:

• install go on the remote VM
• clone this repo
• build the binary
• install a cron that runs this binary every day at 14:00 UTC