Installing rainbow mind machine

To install rainbow mind machine manually, use the normal setup.py procedure:

git clone https://github.com/rainbow-mind-machine/rainbow-mind-machine.git
cd rainbow-mind-machine
python setup.py build 
python setup.py install

To install rainbow mind machine with pip:

pip install rainbowmindmachine

Required Packages

If you need a list of required packages, see requirements.txt. These packages will be installed using either of the above installation methods.

What You Need to Run a Bot Flock

You will need a few additional things before you can get a bot flock up and running with rainbow mind machine.

A Bot Idea

You will need to decide on the behaviors you want the bot to have, so you know how to structure the bot repository, what data to include, and how to extend Sheep and Shepherd.

You will be defining how the Sheep (one sheep = one bot) will populate their tweet queues. This may be a simple action (get an item from a list owned by the Sheep), or it may be a complicated one (make a URL request to get live data, query a database, call an API, etc.).

See example_flocks/.

Bot Master Account

It's good practice to create the OAuth application you'll be using to run your bot flock under a bot master account.

Like your OAuth application, the bot master account can be used to run as many bot flocks as you would like, so you don't need to make it flock-specific.

This account is also (obviously) not itself a bot, so you can use your personal twitter account as the bot master account.

Bot Accounts

rainbow mind machine handles everything but the creation of bot accounts. You must already have created a user account for each bot.

No customization of the bot accounts is needed prior to using rainbow mind machine - rainbow mind machine can take care of setting profile, profile color, bio, and avatar information.

A Twitter App

You also need to create a Twitter application. You can use one application across all of your bot flocks - there is no limit on the number of accounts a single application can control.

It is recommended you create this app using a "bot master" account, and not using the bot accounts themselves.

This will register your rainbow mind machine bot flock application with Twitter, and give you credentials (one token and one secret token) that will allow you to connect to Twitter's API as the rainbow mind machine application that you are about to build.

When you register your application you will get a token and a secret token. These are provided to the Keymaker. (See boring mind machine.)