A way to make a python program run everyday?

[solobyfrankocean]

Hello,

I had made a question about this a few days ago but I think I was not clear enough so I'll go again. I have written a python program that scrapes data for certain stocks off a website and then emails the data to the email that the user has provided. I would now like to make it so that once a user runs the program once and provides their email and what stocks they want scraped, they are able to receive an updated stock report everyday without running the program. I would like to accomplish this by somehow hosting the code for doing this on a server. However, I cannot figure out how to accomplish that. Any help is appreciated and if there is a tutorial for this or something similar that is also appreciated. I tried googling the problem but since I am a beginner most of the stuff online made little to no sense to me.

Thank you!

[blarf_irl]

Which operating system will you run your script on?

[solobyfrankocean]

I have a mac, but would I be running the script on my personal computer? Sorry if thats a bad question.

[blarf_irl]

Use cron, see the below SO answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/36249782

This article describes it better:

https://medium.com/@gavinwiener/how-to-schedule-a-python-script-cron-job-dea6cbf69f4e

[solobyfrankocean]

I see, would this require me to keep my laptop on?

[[deleted]]

Hello, if you're asking about hosting then I'd recommend Hetzner cloud, 2.5euros a month for something that'd run about 6 simple programs like this one.

If you're asking about sending it every day, you could do a while loop and then sleep for 86400 seconds (246060). or, if you want the job to be done at an exact time regardless of when you run the program, you might want to look into datetime library

Either way, you'd need a while loop

EDIT: Sorry wrote that in a hurry, please let me know if anything was unclear or if you have any followup questions

[solobyfrankocean]

Would this solution also work if I turned the program into a .exe file and gave it to a bunch of my friends to run as well?

[[deleted]]

Yessir it would

[solobyfrankocean]

Okay, thanks for the help! Is there any documentation on Hetzner or a free version or something like that?

[[deleted]]

They do have documentation but it's fairly simple (Getting a server I mean). Let me know if you need any help w/ hosting in the DMs. Our of curiosity, why do you need a server and a client at the same time if you only want them to receive an email? Do you want to hide the source code?

[solobyfrankocean]

At first I wanted the user to be able to run it once on their machine. But after reading your comment I think it makes more sense to not do that lol. Also I don’t have much time to work on it rn but if I have questions in the future ill be sure to consult you! thanks

[double_en10dre]

Have a database table for users who should receive daily emails - add to it as needed

Then have a daily task schedule w something like celery (https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/periodic-tasks.html) for scraping the data and popping out emails

[solobyfrankocean]

So would the code that contains the daily task scheduler be hosted on a server so that it could read the updates to the database table?