hpr-tools/Community_News/Thanking_hosts_at_end_of_year.md

Thanking hosts at the end of the year

Introduction

Every year, in the last Community News recording (for December) it has been the norm to list all of the hosts who have contributed. A list of host names is assembled for this purpose, included in the notes and read out by the volunteers.

Method

A Bash script exists, called thanks_to_hosts, which manages the generation of the list of hosts. The end product is a piece of HTML for insertion into the notes.

The script is invoked simply by typing:

thanks_to_hosts

By default, the script uses the current year when generating the list of hosts. If, as may happen, the list is being generated in the next year, then a 4-digit year can be given in as an argument.

Items required to run

The thanks_to_hosts script requires a number of tools and files to run:

• query2tt2 - this is a Perl script which performs a database query and hands the results to Template Toolkit template.

• hpr.db - a SQLite database which contains a copy of the live HPR database. This needs to have been refreshed in the recent past.

• .hpr_sqlite.cfg - the configuration file for query2tt2 to indicate what type of database is being used and where to find it.

• hosts_in_year.sqlite.sql - a file containing the query used (using SQLite syntax)

• hosts_list.tpl - the template which will be used to generate HTML

Output file

Running the script thanks_to_hosts, if successful, will result in the generation of a file called hosts_in_year_${YEAR}.html, where ${YEAR} is replaced by the default or explicit year. The script will report the name of this file for convenience.