StackAutoLogin

Automatically log in to your Stack Exchange sites every day!

StackAutoLogin (SAL) is a Python script that in combination with a GitHub workflow, allows you to log in to your Stack Exchange sites every day. This allows you to continue your consecutive visited days no matter what happens.

SAL uses the Python selenium webDriver and ChromeDriver to browse the web without a human! First, it logs into the Stack Exchange website. Then, it goes to the Meta Stack Exchange website. It will visit any other SE websites you put in the SITES repository secret along with their Meta sites!

Setup

NOTE: If you log in using Google, that won't work with SAL. You can easily configure your account to be able to log in without Google (in addition to logging in with Google) by making a password for normal login. Put in your email and click "Forgot Password." Remember the password for setting SAL up.

Providing Information

You must provide your credentials by putting your email and password into actions repository secrets.

Put your email into a secret with the name EMAIL

And your password into a secret named PASSWORD

Any other sites you would like SAL to log in to you must put into a secret named SITES. They must be the domain of the site without ".com". For example, for Ask Ubuntu, it's domain is askubuntu.com. Use askubuntu. Or for Apple Stack Exchange, its domain is apple.stackexchange.com. Use apple.stackexchange.

Your final SITES secret may look something like this:

Your secrets list should look like this:

Watch it Work

After this, you can sit back and relax as it logs in at 00:00 UTC every day.

Running Locally

If you would like to try it out on your computer, you must create a virtual Python environment and install the selenium (just like the Action does every time it runs).

Creating Environment on Linux

NOTE: You may need the python3-venv package before being able to create a virtual environment.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install python3-venv

Create the virtual environment. Try python3 instead of python if it doesn't work

python -m venv venv

Activate the environment

source ./venv/bin/activate

Edit environment file

sudo nano /etc/environment

Add environment variables to file

EMAIL=myemail@example.com
PASSWORD=mypassword
SITES="stackoverflow, superuser, serverfault, gaming.stackexchange, gamedev.stackexchange, apple.stackexchange, security.stackexchange, askubuntu, english.stackexchange, unix.stackexchange, raspberrypi.stackexchange, diy.stackexchange, photo.stackexchange"

When you're finished press CTRL + X and then Y.

Creating Environment on Windows

Create the virtual environment

python -m venv venv

Activate the environment

.\venv\Scripts\activate

Set environment variables

setx EMAIL myemail@example.com /m

setx PASSWORD mypassword /m

setx SITES "stackoverflow, superuser, serverfault, gaming.stackexchange, gamedev.stackexchange, apple.stackexchange, security.stackexchange, askubuntu, english.stackexchange, unix.stackexchange, raspberrypi.stackexchange, diy.stackexchange, photo.stackexchange" /m

Running

Install selenium

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run SAL with the unbuffered option. It makes it so the log outputs things right away

python -u main.py

Debugging

You can see SAL working in your browser

Go to chrome://inspect, click Configure, add 127.0.0.1:9222, and click done. A "remote target" should pop up. When it does, click Inspect.

Now you can watch SAL browse the web live!

SAL also saves a screenshot as stackexchange.png so you can see right away if it successfully logged in or not.

(c) 2024 Anston Sorensen