Magic: The GIFening

A Twitter bot which tweets Magic: the Gathering cards with appropriate GIFs superimposed onto them. Made in Python using the GIPHY API and MoviePy.

You can see the bot in action at the Twitter account @MTGIFening.

Some highlights:

In order to tweet on a regular schedule, the Dockerfile contains a cronjob which runs the script at the specified interval of time (currently set at 4 times a day/every 6 hours).

Usage

First, create a secrets.py with the appropriate GIPHY and Twitter API Keys:

GIPHY_API_KEY = '<FILL IN>'
CONSUMER_KEY = '<FILL IN>'
CONSUMER_SECRET = '<FILL IN>'
ACCESS_KEY = '<FILL IN>'
ACCESS_SECRET = '<FILL IN>'

The current list of cards used to generate images is derived from cards.csv. If you want to update the list, use get_cardlist.py and the AllSets.json file from MTG JSON.

Then run mtgifening.py and it should save and tweet a random GIF!

To run as a Twitter bot on the schedule, after you've added your secrets.py file, build the Docker container. Then run the container in detached mode, starting it up using /sbin/my_init:

docker run --rm -d magic /sbin/my_init

Notes

• The files generated are actually videos, not proper GIFs. Videos are created much faster, take less disk space, and on Twitter, functionally identical to GIFs (videos less than 6 seconds will also autoloop).

Requirements

moviepy, ffmpeg, twython, Pillow

Maintainer/Creator

Max Woolf (@minimaxir)

Max's open-source projects are supported by his Patreon. If you found this project helpful, any monetary contributions to the Patreon are appreciated and will be put to good creative use.

License