Using CLI to enable Bot

---

Hi,

I’m trying to enable Bot through the command line to process a JSON feed. I can successfully get Bot to process the feed when enabled if I’m doing this through AE’s GUI. I can’t get this work using the CLI. I’ve tried troubleshooting by:

1. Using the CLI, I can successfully get Bot to process a record from my JSON feed if my templater-options.json file has tasks/render set to true. Processing successfully runs pre and post output scripts which change render-status in the feed from ready -> queued -> done
2. If I change templater-options.json to tasks / render to false, and set tasks / bot_enable to true, I can launch the job through the CLI, and don’t see any errors. I get the message : ‘The Bot for Templater is now enabled.’. However, the record is not processed. I have ensured that the value of render-status has been reset to ‘ready’ before launching the CLI.

Any suggestions why Bot is not processing the record?

Pete

@pbretz Can you share the command you are using to invoke from the terminal or prompt? Are you using the -ui flag? When you enable bot from the command line, the tasks object should be

{
      "render"     : false    
    , "replicate"  : false    
    , "enable_bot" : true    
}

There is a bot object within the prefs object, and you can set what you want the bot to do there:

{
    .
    .
    .
    "prefs" : {
                     "bot" : { "action_render": true, "action_replicate": false }
              }
    .
    .
    .
}

I’m using a Mac Pro running MacOS High Sierra. I’ve been using:

./templater.sh -v ‘CC 2019’ -ui

Yes, I’ve been using the settings you show in your post:

“render” : false,
“replicate” : false,
“enable_bot” : true

I’ve also been using the bot paramaters:

“action_render” : true,
“action_replicate” : false

I don’t see any errors when the command loads, or when it finishes. The log doesn’t show any errors, It just doesn’t start processing records. If I use the UI with the same settings, from what I can tell, there are no issues.

On a related note, processing is running fine using CLI and rendering Google worksheet data for another project using:

“render” : true,
“replicate” : false,
“enable_bot” : false

Pete

One observation, when processing using “render” : true, records are processed, but the performance seems to be noticeably slower than when using the GUI. Is this to be expected? Is it possible that “enable_bot” : true is actually working but takes longer to start processing the JSON feed than when enabling through the GUI?

@pbretz Are you able to share a screen recording illustrating the issue? If you want it to be private, you can create a support ticket.