Reddit Notifier

Summary

This tool can be run as either a service or as a regular process and can notify you via Pushbullet when posts are made to a subreddit based on criteria you specify.

Eventually, more notification mechanisms may come, and contributions are welcome

Usage

Installing this package globally will provide a global script named reddit-notifier.

npm i -g reddit-notifier@latest

reddit-notifier --version
reddit-notifier --help
reddit-notifier --config ~/.reddit-notifier/config.js --data-dir ~/.reddit-notifier/data

The data directory is where logs and state will be stored.

Configuration

Below is a sample configuration

{
  "pushbullet": {
    "apiKey": "",
    "deviceId": "",
    "encryptionKeyBase64": ""
  },
  "monitor": {
    "subreddit": "test",
    "matches": {
      "title": {
        "any": [
          {
            "matches": "^reddit-notifier"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

• pushbullet.apiKey: the api key to pushbullet. It can be retrieved from your Pushbullet Settings
• pushbullet.deviceId: string | string[] | {}. It can be a single device id, an array of them, or {} if you want to notify all of your devices. You can get your device ids in the settings under devices. Simply select your device and pull the hash from the URL
• monitor.subreddit: the name of the subreddit to monitor. currently only one is supported
• monitor.matches: you may specify any key in this section that matches a field of the reddit post json. Common fields are title and author. See Pushshift api for a list
• monitor.matches..any: to be notified of a post, at least one item in this array must match
• monitor.matches..none: to be notified of a post, at no item in this array must match

JS Configuration

You may specify your configuration as an ES6 module

module.exports = {
  "pushbullet": {
    "apiKey": "",
    "deviceId": "",
    "encryptionKeyBase64": ""
  },
  "monitor": {
    "subreddit": "test",
    "matches": {
      "title": {
        "any": [
          {
            "matches": "^reddit-notifier"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

Matchers

A configuration may be specified as either a JSON or a JS file. Either one can specify matchers as an object, but a JS configuration can also specify a matcher as a function.

Object matchers

monitor.matches..any and monitor.matches..none follow the same specification. They may have one or more keys from the following set:

• matches: regular expression match on the field (case insensitive)
• equals: direct equality match (case sensitive)
• greaterThan: numeric comparison
• lessThan: numeric comparison

The implication with this design is that you may specify multiple criteria for multiple fields. In order to match, a post must match on ALL of the fields specified under monitor.matches (works like a logical AND), but each field may have a number of OR conditions (each item in ANY). Every clause under monitor.matches.<FIELD>.any[#] must be matched (see second example)

Examples

Title field must start with 'hello'

{
  "title": {
    "any": [{
      "matches": "^hello"    
    }]
  }
}

Created field must be greater than 2, but less than 5

{
  "created": {
    "any": [{
      "lessThan": 5,
      "greaterthan": 2
    }],
  }
}

Created field must be greater than 2, but less than 5, and not 3

{
  "created": {
    "any": [{
      "lessThan": 5,
      "greaterthan": 2
    }],
    "none": [{
      "equals": 3
    }]
  }
}

Author must be Bob, and title must start with hello''

{
  "title": {
    "any": [{
      "matches": "^hello"
    }]
  },
  "author": {
    "any": [{
      "equals": "Bob"
    }]
  }
}

Function matchers

{ 
  "title": function(post) {
    return post.startsWith('hello');
  }
}