How to run a program on a schedule - Google colab

Question

Over the past few weeks I've been coding a program which runs a reddit bot locally from my machine. I've perfected it such that it does not reply to the same comment which it has replied to before, it runs quite efficiently, and in my opinion is complete.

Now, I'm looking for a way to get the program to run on a schedule. I currently have the code in google colab, and I don't know how to use google colab for this functionality.

The program does not require any local storage, it's one code file, and does not require much memory, so I wanted to ask if anyone has a resource which has an detailed tutorial accessible for beginners which I could use to host this code

Note: The code requires an installation of PRAW, in google colab I simply do !pip install PRAW if that means anything differently for what I need to do, what should I do differently?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Google Collab is not designed for this kind of things, and most likely it cannot be used to run ypur app on schedule. Probably the easiest solution is some kind of Continuous Integration tool that lets you run code remotely.

Step 1 would be to host your code to some remote code repository like GitHub. Since it most likely won't have to be interactive switching from Collab notebook to simple Python script will make your config much easier later on.

Step 2 would be connecting that repo to some CI tool. One I am familiar with that lets you run pipelines on schedule is CircleCI, with this tutorial here showing very simplistic configuration for running Python scripts from a pipeline.