Check if your Twitter bots are running, get a DM if they aren't.
Send a DM to @yourname if @examplebot hasn't tweeted in 13 hours.
python whatsupbot.py --screen_name examplebot --hours 13 --to yourname
The DM will come from @examplebot, and it will say something like "I'm not working. It's been 14 hours since my last tweet. Fix me!". If everything is running fine, nothing will happen!
Oh yeah, in real life you're going to have to pass in your authentication tokens! Run python whatsupbot.py --help for details.
At a minimum What's up bot requires tweepy. Some additional features are unlocked if you install twitter_bot_utils, which is just a handy wrapper around tweepy.
To install twitter_bot_utils, download the repo and run:
pip -r requirements.txt
Then copy whatsupbot.py to somewhere handy.
Install with a cron job, which might look something like this:
5 * * * * python path/to/whatsupbot.py --screen_name botname --to yourname --consumer-key [etc]
Wait, you ask - what if my bot has been suspended, then it can't send me DMs! That's a good point. If you would like another account to do the DM sending, use the --from option:
python whatsupbot.py --screen_name botname --from thirdparty --to yourname --consumer-key ... --consumer-secret ... --key ... --secret ...
To check lots of bots at once, create a config file, following the format in config.yaml (the file can also be JSON, if you prefer). This also gives you a handy place to put your authentication tokens. An example config.yaml file is in the repository (json works too).
Use the whatsupbot key to either ignore bots or customize the hours limit on each bot.
Then run:
python whatsupbot.py --to yourname --config config.yaml
The --from flag also works with this set-up. If the "from" account is in the bots.yaml file, its authentication keys will be used.
Thanks to mattlaschneider for the urbotbroke code, and to all the fine friendly folks at #botALLY for being fine friendly folks.