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+# mlblive-mastodon-scripts
+This repo contains some scripts to help automate posting live MLB game updates
+to Mastodon.
+
+## Structure
+* `mlbplaysave.sh` and `mlbplaypost.sh` are used in tandem to post scoring
+  updates. The former saves new plays to a SQLite database, and the latter
+reads the database and posts any scoring plays that have not been posted yet.
+* `mlbhighlightsave.sh` and `mlbhighlightpost.sh` work similarly to the
+  previous pair, but post video highlights instead.
+* `posthighlights.sql` and `postplays.sql` are used by the posting scripts to
+  select unposted data and then mark that data as posted.
+* `schema.sql` defines the table that new data gets saved to.
+
+Note that there are invisible characters (like 0x1f) in some of the files.
+These are used as delimiters when processing the data.
+
+## How to use
+### Dependencies
+To run these scripts, you'll need a few other programs:
+* [mlblive](https://scm.dairydemon.net/filifa/mlblive), another program I wrote
+  for retrieving data from MLB's Stats API
+* `toot`, a CLI program for Mastodon
+* `jq`, a program for processing JSON data
+* `sqlite3` for saving and loading data
+* some standard Unix programs (`sed`, `awk`, `curl`, etc.)
+
+You may want to review the scripts yourself to see what you might be missing.
+
+### Setup guidelines
+Here's some high-level instructions to mirror the setup I use for these
+scripts:
+1. Put all the shell scripts somewhere convenient (I put them in
+   `~/.local/bin`).
+2. Pick a directory to keep the SQLite database in (I picked
+   `~/.local/share/mlblive`).
+3. Create the database with `sqlite3 <filename> < schema.sql`
+4. Put the other SQL scripts in the same directory as the database.
+5. Review the scripts to see what arguments they require.
+6. Write some systemd services and timers to execute the shell scripts
+   automatically on some interval. Set the working directory to the directory
+with the database.