Automate! Automate!

 Making this customizable

👉So how about making our search user customizable? In the code below, I have:

Asked the user to input an artist (line 14)

Tidied up their input (line 15)

formatted the search URL as an fString that includes the artist (line 19)

Here's tAutomate! Automate!

We are so close. I can taste it, folks! Massive kudos on getting this far!

Today's lesson, however, will work best if you have one of Replit's paid for features (hacker plan or cycles).

Free plan Repls 'fall asleep' after a while. Automation kinda relies on the Repl being always on.

If you have hacker plan or you've bought some cycles, then you can enable always on in the drop down menu that appears when you click your Repl name (top left).he code:

This is important because when our repl is always running, it can keep track of time and schedule events.

👉 I've set up a simple schedule that prints out a clock emoji every couple of seconds. It works like this:

Import schedule library

Create a simple subroutine that outputs the emoji.

Schedule the subroutine to run every 2 seconds with schedule.every(2).seconds.do(printMe)

Create an infinite loop that repeats schedule.run_pending() - this means run any tasks in the schedule.

import schedule

def printMe():

  print("⏰")

schedule.every(2).seconds.do(printMe)

while True:

  schedule.run_pending()

This is great and everything, but it's a HUGE resource hog - look at the CPU indicator in the 'Repl Resources' pane! It's running that while True loop thousands (millions?) of times a second to check if there's anything in the schedule.

A quick hack for this is to put a little time.sleep() to make the loop run once per second instead. Here's the code:

import schedule, time # Import the time library

def printMe():

  print("⏰")

schedule.every(2).seconds.do(printMe)

while True:

  schedule.run_pending()

  time.sleep(1) # Pause for 1 second before moving on

What if we wanted to run something every few minutes instead? Easy peasy!

schedule.every(2).minutes.do(printMe)

Hours? Of course!

schedule.every(2).hours.do(printMe)

Email? How Quaint.

You will need an email account for this. I'm using GMail and generating a one time password. Gmail users can do this in the security settings for your google account (generate an app password). Other mail services may let you use your regular password, but Gmail has this extra security layer.

In Gmail, choose 'Mail App' and 'Other' (call it 'Replit').

How about we send ourselves a very lovely email to remind ourselves to take a little break.

 Copy the app password and set it as a Repl secret called mailPassword.

👉 Add another secret mailUsername and set it to your email address.

👉 Import os and add your secrets to the code:

import schedule, time, os

password = os.environ['mailPassword']

username = os.environ['mailUsername']

def printMe():

  print("⏰")

schedule.every(2).seconds.do(printMe)

while True:

  schedule.run_pending()

  time.sleep(1)

Set up the mail

👉 Now we can set up the mail.

There is a LOT going on here, so I've commented all of the new code.

TLDR: New imports. New subroutine to set all the mail parameters. Create the mail & send it. Call the subroutine to test it.

import schedule, time, os, smtplib # Import the smtp library

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart # Import the mime library to create multipart messages

from email.mime.text import MIMEText # Import the mime library to create text messages

password = os.environ['mailPassword']

username = os.environ['mailUsername']

def sendMail():

  email = "Don't forget to take a break!" # Contents of the message

  server = "smtp.gmail.com" # Address of the mail server, change it to yours if you need to

  port = 587 # Port of the mail server, change it to yours if you need to

  s = smtplib.SMTP(host = server, port = port) # Creates the server connection using the host and port details

  s.starttls() # Sets the encryption mode

  s.login(username, password) # Logs into the email server for us

  msg = MIMEMultipart() # Creates the message

  msg['To'] = "recipient@email.com" # Sets the receiver's email address

  msg['From'] = username # Sets the sender's email address

  msg['Subject'] = "Take a BREAK" # Sets the subject of the message

  msg.attach(MIMEText(email, 'html')) # Attaches the email content to the message as html

  s.send_message(msg) # Sends the message

  del msg # Deletes the message from memory

sendMail() # Call the subroutine to test it.

def printMe():

  print("⏰")

schedule.every(2).seconds.do(printMe)

while True:

  schedule.run_pending()

  time.sleep(1)

Schedule it

👉 Now let's schedule it to send every hour:

import schedule, time, os, smtplib 

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart 

from email.mime.text import MIMEText 

password = os.environ['mailPassword']

username = os.environ['mailUsername']

def sendMail():

  email = "Don't forget to take a break!" 

  server = "smtp.gmail.com" 

  port = 587 

  s = smtplib.SMTP(host = server, port = port) 

  s.starttls() 

  s.login(username, password) 

  msg = MIMEMultipart() 

  msg['To'] = "recipient@email.com" 

  msg['From'] = username 

  msg['Subject'] = "Take a BREAK" 

  msg.attach(MIMEText(email, 'html'))

  s.send_message(msg) 

  del msg 

def printMe():

  print("⏰ Sending Reminder")

  sendMail() # Moved the subroutine into printMe which is already scheduled

schedule.every(1).hours.do(printMe) # Changed the interval to every 1 hour

while True:

  schedule.run_pending()

  time.sleep(1)