my tildelog

a blog about tildes

botany

July 01, 2022 — ~nic

I found a fun little script called ‘botany’ pre-installed here on tilde.team. Apparently it works like a Tamagotchi – I need to check in each day to water my seed, then a great plant will eventually grow out of it. Quite a few people on this server have plants. I’m not sure how to view them though.

At first I wanted to hack it to make my plant larger. I found a JSON file but that is just an automatic export that is not used for anything. Then I found a Python Pickle file, but that turned out to be hard to work with. I also found the sqlite file, but for some reason sqlite3 is telling me that’s not a database.

Then I wanted to show off my plant. At first I tried using PHP passthru() to run botany-viewer right from PHP, but that actually runs under the context of php-fpm user, so it did not show my plant. There isn’t an obvious way to let PHP run under my user context… but then I realized there’s no need for that!

I set up a little cron job that runs botany-viewer on an hourly basis and saves it into my web directory. Then my plant can be viewed at the right URL. I went one step further and used some PHP on my homepage to render the plant as preformatted text. Nice.

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tags: tilde.team, botany