Another OpenWhisk Cron Example — the Blog Nag

Last week I blogged about my first experience working with OpenWhisk triggers and rules, specifically the Cron trigger which lets you execute actions according to a schedule. Today I’m sharing another example, which, while not as complex as the 911 scraper, I thought was kind of fun.

As a blogger, I try to keep to a certain amount of posts per month. While I a absolutely care more about quality than quantity, I still try to maintain a certain amount of content per month. I thought it would be fun to create an OpenWhisk action that would nag me if I hadn’t blogged in a few days. This turned out to be rather simple:

• First, I get the RSS feed.
• Then I parse the XML. There’s packages to read RSS, but there’s also xml2js which just does a basic conversion.
• I can then check the date of the most recent article and compare it to now.
• If it’s been too long, nag!

Let’s start with the action:

const request = require('request');
const parseString = require('xml2js').parseString;
//number of days you have till i bug you
const NAG_DAY = 2;
//SendGrid API Key
const SG_KEY = 'SG.whywontanyonecommentonthestuffiputhere';
const helper = require('sendgrid').mail;
function doNag(last) {
    let from_email = new helper.Email('raymondcamden@gmail.com');
    let to_email = new helper.Email('raymondcamden@gmail.com');
    let subject = 'You Need to Blog!';
    let content = `
You have not blogged in the past ${NAG_DAY} days!
Your last post was on ${last}.
`
    let mailContent = new helper.Content('text/plain', content);
    let mail = new helper.Mail(from_email, subject, to_email, mailContent);
    let sg = require('sendgrid')(SG_KEY);
    var request = sg.emptyRequest({
        method: 'POST',
        path: '/v3/mail/send',
        body: mail.toJSON()
    });
        
    sg.API(request, function(error, response) {
        if(error) {
            console.log(error.response.body);
        } else {
            //right now we do nothing really
        }
    });
}
function main() {
    let rssurl = 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/raymondcamdensblog';
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        request.get(rssurl, function(error, response, body) {
            if(error) return reject(error);
            parseString(body, function(err, result) {
                if(err) return reject(err);
                //Latest post:
                let latest = result.rss.channel[0].item[0];
                //now lets try to parse the date
                let latestDate = new Date(latest.pubDate[0]).getTime();
                //alright then - so compare Now to latestDate
                let now = Date.now();
                //difference is how much time (duh)
                let diff = now - latestDate;
                if(diff > (NAG_DAY * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000)) {
                    console.log('got to nag!');
                    doNag(latest.pubDate[0]);
                    resolve({status:true});
                } else {
                    resolve({status:false});
                }
            });
        });
    });
}
exports.main = main;

Start with the main function which is OpenWhisk’s entry point to the function. I use the request library to open up my RSS feed and then parseString from the xml2js library. I can then get the most recent blog entry (which is the first entry in a RSS feed) and make a date object with it.

Once I have that — then it’s math. I set the constant NAG_DAY to 2, which is a bit too low if you ask me, but I had blogged on Friday so I needed a value that would trigger the alert. (For folks curious, I try to blog once every 3 days.) If we need to nag, we then simply call doNag.

The doNag function just writes an email using the Sendgrid API and fires it out. And that’s it.

So then I had to make this “live” — which beforehand would have meant provisioning a server and all that, but with the wonders of Serverless (yes, I’m half-joking here ;) I just did the following:

• Sent the action up to OpenWhisk with the CLI (wsk action create --kind nodejs:6 rssnag rssnag.zip)
• Made the trigger (wsk trigger create checkBlog --feed /whisk.system/alarms/alarm --param cron "* * 1 * *"). That Cron value is for once a day, and yes I had to use http://crontab-generator.org again.
• Made the rule (wsk rule create blogNagRule checkBlog rssnag)

And that’s it. To test I used the OpenWhisk UI on IBM Bluemix and manually triggered it. And the result….

This post originally appeared on my blog at https://www.raymondcamden.com/2017/02/21/another-openwhisk-cron-example-the-blog-nag