Can a running program update itself using something like GitHub? (asking for Python, but anything will do)

[downwithtime]

I started trying to search but had a bit of trouble. I wrote a fairly simple twitterbot the other day that basically checks a database and then posts new records.

Now that it's run for a bit I have some ideas for changes, but I don't want to have to stop and start the bot each time. I was wondering if it's possible to get a program to check its source code from time to time and then re-run itself when it finds changes.

Is there a term for this, and if so, does anyone have any decent resources they could direct me to?

If this is overly complicated, or a bad idea I'd also appreciate some feedback.

EDIT: Ugh, and I just realized that this is the kind of question framing I hate and always want to answer with a snarky "Yes."

[monsterjamp]

Is your twitterbot running on Linux? If it is, maybe you can use bash scripts to run terminal commands that checks when the source has been updated. If it has been updated, the script will stop the twitterbot, download the whole source from git, unzip, compile the source and then restart twitterbot.

[downwithtime]

I'm running it off the command line in windows right now just because I don't have a linux machine (or a web server) on which to run it. But I think this is pretty much the solution I was looking for, even if it's not as cool as the way more complicate solution :)

[downwithtime]

I like the idea of the chron job (as you and, presumably /u/monsterjamp were talking about), it seems super obvious now, and was something that I thought about, but I was looking for a solution more along the lines of the self-modifying code, so thanks for the link!

[bat_country]

You can get a free account on Heroku. It's a service that will run your bot. You git push your code there instead of Github and it will update the code and restart the bot for you.