Updates to README to explain recent changes and logging

Now the log_dir and log_file_path actually do something useful.

README.md

@@ -13,6 +13,12 @@ feedparser
 
 The remaining imports should all be part of the standard Python install.
 
+## Important Notes
+
+As it currently is written, the script uses the hash of the post title to prevent sending duplicates. However, a recent change to check for the publish time was added, only because some feeds are not in reverse chronological order (latest post at top of feed, ie, entry index 0). Because of this, we do actually need to check the publish times. This still needs some testing and things might be a bit broken because of it. If you see any issues please let me know.
+
+Logging was recently enabled. Make sure that the user running the script (especially when using systemd timers) has write access to the /var/log/discorss directory. The app will try and create the directory for you, but if your user doesn't have permissions to create directories in /var/log this will fail and this will probably crash the script as is. I will try and remember to catch that exception and exit gracefully with an error message to stdout. If you want the logs to go somewhere else, just edit the log_dir variable near the top of discorss.py. Choose a directory that makes sense. Unfortunately, as far as I know, the XDG standards don't have an equivalent to the /var/log directory in the user directory, so I wasn't sure what the best default was. In the future, we may switch to logging using systemd and journald directly, though it is nice to have a separate file.
+
 ## How to setup
 
 To configure the script, create /etc/discorss.conf with the following structure:

discorss.py

@@ -13,6 +13,7 @@
 import requests
 import feedparser
 import hashlib
+import logging
 from pathlib import Path
 import json
 import time
@@ -42,13 +43,13 @@ app_config = {}
 # TODO: make the character limit smarter, as to split at a natural point
 def get_description(feed):
     try:
-        temporary_string = str(feed.entries[0]["summary_detail"]["value"])
+        temporary_string = str(feed["summary_detail"]["value"])
         temporary_string = html_filter.sub("", temporary_string)
         desc = (
             temporary_string[:250] if len(temporary_string) > 250 else temporary_string
         )
     except KeyError:
-        temporary_string = str(feed.entries[0]["description"])
+        temporary_string = str(feed["description"])
         temporary_string = html_filter.sub("", temporary_string)
         desc = (
             temporary_string[:250] if len(temporary_string) > 250 else temporary_string
@@ -58,10 +59,11 @@ def get_description(feed):
 
 def setupPaths():
     global app_config
+    global logger
     # Check for log and config files/paths, create empty directories if needed
     # TODO: make this cleaner
-    if not Path(log_file_path).exists():
+    if not Path(log_dir).exists():
-        print("No log file path exists. Yark! We'll try and make {}...", log_dir)
+        print("No log file path exists. Yark! We'll try and make {}...".format(log_dir))
         try:
             Path(log_dir).mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
         except FileExistsError:
@@ -85,6 +87,15 @@ def setupPaths():
     # Loading the config file
     with open(config_file_path, "r") as config_file:
         app_config = json.load(config_file)
+    # Set up logging
+    logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
+    logging.basicConfig(
+        filename=str(log_dir + log_file_path),
+        encoding="utf-8",
+        level=logging.INFO,
+        datefmt="%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S",
+        format="%(asctime)s: %(levelname)s: %(message)s",
+    )
     return
 
 
@@ -99,24 +110,28 @@ def main():
         last_check = now - 21600  # first run, no lastupdate, check up to 6 hours ago
     for i, hook in enumerate(app_config["feeds"]):
         # Get the feed
-        print("Parsing feed {}...".format(hook["name"]))
+        logger.info("Parsing feed %s...", hook["name"])
         feeds = feedparser.parse(hook["url"])
         latest_post = []
         prev_best = 0
-        for feed in feeds:
+        for feed in feeds["entries"]:
             try:
+                bad_time = False
                 published_time = time.mktime(feed["published_parsed"])
                 published_time = published_time + hook["offset"]
             except KeyError:
-                published_time = feed["published"]
+                published_time = time.mktime(feed["updated_parsed"])
-                print(published_time)
+                bad_time = True
-                sys.exit(254)
             if published_time > prev_best:
                 latest_post = feed
                 prev_best = published_time
             else:
                 continue
-
+        if bad_time is True:
+            logger.warning(
+                "Feed %s doesn't supply a published time, using updated time instead",
+                hook["name"],
+            )
         # Hash the title of the latest post and use that to determine if it's been posted
         new_hash = hashlib.sha3_512(bytes(latest_post["title"], "utf-8")).hexdigest()
         try:
@@ -126,7 +141,16 @@ def main():
                 continue
         except KeyError:
             app_config["feeds"][i]["lasthash"] = new_hash
+            logger.info(
+                "Feed %s has no existing hash, likely a new feed!", hook["name"]
+            )
         # Generate the webhook
+        logger.info(
+            "Publishing webhook for %s. Last check was %d, now is %d",
+            hook["name"],
+            last_check,
+            now,
+        )
         webhook = {
             "embeds": [
                 {
@@ -157,16 +181,13 @@ def main():
         }
         webhook_string = json.dumps(webhook)
 
-        if published_time > last_check:
+        r = requests.post(hook["webhook"], data=webhook_string, headers=custom_header)
-            r = requests.post(
-                hook["webhook"], data=webhook_string, headers=custom_header
-            )
         if r.status_code not in success_codes:
-                print(
+            logger.error(
-                    "Error {} while trying to post {}".format(
+                "Error %d while trying to post %s", r.status_code, hook["webhook"]
-                        r.status_code, hook["webhook"]
-                    )
             )
+
+    # End of feed loop
     app_config["lastupdate"] = now
     with open(config_file_path, "w") as config_file:
         json.dump(app_config, config_file, indent=4)