Bluesky nowplaying bots

What are they and how do they work?

These are my oldest kinds of bots. I ran the first 6 Music nowplaying bot on Twitter (in 2012!), then moved to Bluesky when free API access was turned off. I initially hosted them on Digital Ocean, then on Glitch for a while, then moved them to Val Town when Glitch closed down.

Each bot, like @6music.bsky.social, runs as a small Val Town script on a cron job every 10 minutes. When it starts, it resumes a saved Bluesky session from a SQLite database, fetches the current track from the BBC data feed, and builds a #nowplaying post for that station.

While the Val is running, it checks the feed every 15 seconds and compares the current track with a local in-memory cache. Only when the track has changed does it try to post, with a quick check of the bot's recent Bluesky feed as a second duplicate guard.

Environment variables

Each scheduled Val Town bot uses a small set of environment variables so the same script can be reused for different BBC stations and Bluesky accounts.

BLUESKY_SHORTNAME

The bot key used to find the right row in the database and build the hashtag, for example 6music.

BLUESKY_USERNAME

The Bluesky account identifier the bot logs in as.

BLUESKY_PASSWORD

The Bluesky app password used when a saved session cannot be resumed.

BBC_DATA_URL

The BBC endpoint for the station's currently playing music data.

TURSO_DATABASE_URL

The database URL that stores each bot's session and latest posted track.

TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN

The auth token used to read and update the bot state.

The database

There's not much to it: a single SQLite table with one row per bot, storing the bot name, the saved Bluesky session JSON, and the latest post text used for duplicate detection.