Help:VOD script

When a new Critical Role episode is released on YouTube, there are a number of wiki updates that need to performed. Most of these are done semi-automatically by running a pywikibot script.

Checklist for when new VOD is uploaded to YouTube
You can run any subset of these tasks as well. For every potential change, you will be shown a diff of the edit and asked to accept or reject it. No changes will be made automatically. Actions are skipped if change is not needed (e.g., an entry for the episode already exists on the module page). Use global  option for testing, where no changes to the live wiki will be done, but it will do everything else other than save the changes (e.g., download the thumbnail).

Episode data to pass to script
Only two of these fields are required. If you run a task above that requires one of these fields below that isn't entered, you will be prompted to enter that value.

Lists to be maintained
Within the script file, there are some values that may need to be updated or changed. These should be edited by hand if their information changes.

Generate a bot password
You can create a special password just for pywikibot at Special:BotPasswords. You should use a unique bot password for every method you use to programmatically access the wiki. You may also want to create a special wiki account for automated editing with a bot flag.

Install Python 3 and pywikibot
You will need at least Python 3.9 to run this script. To see if you have python 3 installed, open your command line interface (CLI) and type. If it's not 3.9 you can download it here and install it. Once you've verified that  is at least 3.9, run. If you have a Windows machine, you will also need to run.

Set up pywikibot
Download the latest version of pywikibot on GitHub (or clone the repository). Save the new pywikibot folder/directory somewhere easily accessible. In your CLI, navigate to the pywikibot directory. Generate the wiki-specific files you need for logging in by following the configuration guide for third-party wikis;  does not exist by default and must be created. Your login credentials will be stored in  and.

Running the script
Download a copy of the VOD script here. Save its contents as, which needs to be added to the   directory within pywikibot. To run the script on the command line, make sure you are in the pywikibot top-level folder. Here's what it looked like for episode 3x26:

More documentation about  can be found on its page.