This is a console app designed to be run as a bot. It posts a preconfigured list of exchange rates to Mastodon. For an example implementation, see https://mastodon.africa/@ZARExchangeRates
In order to use this bot, you'll need an account at https://apilayer.com/ with a subscription to the ExchangeRatesData API. Don't worry, it's free for up to 250 requests per month.
You'll also need a Mastodon Access Token with permission to write:statuses. You can get one of those by going to Preferences -> Development in your Mastodon account.
Pull the code and build it for your preferred platform. I've tested it on both Windows x64 and Ubuntu 23.04 x64.
Then open a terminal and run the following for each setting to configure everything:
ExchangeRateTooter --set <setting> <value>
- ExchangeRateApiKey - The API Key you received from apilayer.com
- BaseCurrencyCode - The currency code to get exchange rates for (e.g.
USD) - CompareCurrencyCodes - A comma-separated list of currencies to compare with the base (e.g.
EUR,GBP,AUD) - CurrenciesMaxRetryCount - Should the currencies API time out, how many times should we retry? The default is
0(i.e. don't retry) - CurrenciesRetryWaitMilliseconds - How many milliseconds should we wait between retries? The default is
60000(i.e. one minute) - MastodonToken - Your Mastodon Access Token
- MastodonInstanceUrl - The URL of your Mastodon instance (e.g.
mastodon.africa) - DmAccountName - The bot will send a direct message to this account in case something goes wrong (e.g.
@[email protected]) - StartTime - Don't run before this time of day (e.g.
09:00) - EndTime - Don't run after this time of day (e.g.
17:00) - PublicHolidays - A comma separated list of dates on which you don't want the app to run (it automatically won't run on Saturdays or Sundays) (e.g.
2023-01-01,2023-03-21,2023-12-25)
Once everything is set up, run:
ExchangeRateTooter --fake
This will connect to the Exchange Rates API and print what it would toot to the console. If you're not happy with that, edit the toot-template.txt, which should be self-explanatory.
Once you're happy, run ExchangeRateTooter without any arguments, and it will do everything silently and post to Mastodon.
Then create a cron job or Windows Scheduled Task to do that as often as you like, and you're good to go! :-)