Neutral News

Neutral News is a slack app and a API that searches the web for the same news by sources with different political biases (accoridng to the Media Bias Chart) and returns one article for each kind of bias (left, center, and right).

This app is not published as an API nor a slack app. However, if you have a token or know how to obtain one, the app is running at this link: neutral-news.herokuapp.com.

Installation

Prerequisites: python3.8 (probably works with python3.9 as well) and pip3.

If you want to install this app locally, these are the steps you need to follow:

1. Download the app, create a virtual environment, and install the requirements with these commands:

   gh repo clone thatsddr/slack-news
   cd slack-news
   virtualenv venv
   source venv/bin/activate
   pip3 install -r requirements.txt
   

2. Create a .env in the root directory file with a REDIS_URL variable or at line 39 in main.py create a local redis instance (the code should look like this: r = redis.Redis(host='localhost', port=6379, db=0))
3. • If you want to use the app in slack, make sure to be the admin of the workspace you want to install the app in, then go to https://api.slack.com, and configure a new app (if you don't know how to do it, you can start at https://api.slack.com/authentication/basics). After configuring the app, go to the .env file and add these 2 variables with the variables retrieved from the configuration: SLACK_TOKEN and SIGNING_SECRET
   • If you want to use the app as an API you have 2 options:
     1. If you don't want to use AUTH0 remove every line that contains @requires_auth in the main.py file, the functions that will not be used anymore, and the Auth.py file.
     2. Otherwise, if you want to use AUTH0, configure a new app on https://manage.auth0.com. Then add these 2 variables: AUTH0_DOMAIN and API_AUDIENCE in your .env file and set them equal to the values retrieved in your AUTH0 dashboard.
4. run python3 code/main.py to start a development server.

Usage

Slack

Once the app is installed in the workspace, you can use the /help command to get a list of all the possible commands and how to use them.

API

The API has the following endpoints:

/api/identifier

Used as AUTH0 API Audience, can also be used to check if a token is valid. Returns 200 or an authentication error.

/api/random

Returns a random news from at least 2 sources or an error.

/api/search-keyword?keyword=YOUR-KEYWORD(S)-HERE

Returns a news relevant to the keyword(s) you've searched for or an error.

/api/search-url?url=YOUR-URL-HERE

Returns a news relevant to the title of webpage you've searhced for or an error. Please note that this endpoint is the most likely to return an error, prefer keywords to URLS when possible.

The /api/random, /api/search-keyword, and /api/search-url endpoints accept GET requests and require the following header: Authorization: Bearer YOUR-VALID-TOKEN-HERE. If the token is valid they return data in the following format:

   {
     "left":{"title":TITLE, "link":LINK, "source":SOURCE},
     "center":{"title":TITLE, "link":LINK, "source":SOURCE},
     "right":{"title":TITLE, "link":LINK, "source":SOURCE}
    }

or {"Error":ERROR-MESSAGE}. If the token is not valid you will get an authorization error.