Erin is the UK Dynasty league's GroupMe chat bot, providing information, initially about rookie draft picks, to the league group chat and by direct message.
Not without some/lots of tinkering, no. Because of the way our league is set up and hosted (we switch from ESPN to MyFantasyLeague in the off-season), the data for who owns rookie picks, etc., is sourced from a Google Sheet. You could of course mimic this setup and use this code as inspiration.
I plan on using this project as a base for creating a reusable GroupMe/MyFantasyLeague chat bot in future, which would use the MyFantasyLeague API to respond to requests from a league's group chat. The idea would be that all you'd need to do is set up a GroupMe bot, and provide its ID and your MFL league ID as environment variables, and you'd be all set.
The app depends on having access to the following environment variables, to avoid storing GroupMe bot IDs and, moreso, access tokens, in the repository.
- GROUPCHAT_BOT_ID: the GroupMe bot ID of the bot that's registered to the league chat.
- GROUPCHAT_BOT_NAME: the GroupMe bot name of the bot that's registered to the league chat. Important this is right! Stops infinite loops where the bot responds to itself.
- DM_USER_ACCESS_TOKEN: the user account access token for the GroupMe bot USER, not bot. This allows the app to send direct messages as the user instead of just posting as a bot to a single group.
Set environment variables for local testing on Heroku (heroku local) by renaming .env.local to .env and setting the values.
source .env for non-Heroku testing.
node ./src/index.js
The app is laid out with deployment to Heroku in mind.
For now, Erin responds only to 2 types of request:
- Who owns a particular draft pick? e.g. Who owns pick 1.10? or Who does pick 2.04 belong to?
- What draft picks does a particular franchise own? e.g. What picks do the Seahawks have?