A simple Python script that sends a "verse of the day" notification to a Telegram Bot. It uses the ESV API to retrieve the verse/reading/passage.

You need to create a config.yml file with the following key/values:

esv_api_token: <api-token>
readings_file: year_1.txt
telegram_base_url: https://api.telegram.org
telegram_bot_chat_id: 
telegram_bot_token: 

You can get an ESV API application and retrieve a token from here. You'll also need to create a Telegram Bot.

Just picking a verse from the bible won't necessarily give you a good verse for the day! Joshua 10:43 for example is not gonna be a particuarly thought provoking one!

Then Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to the camp at Gilgal.

I couldn't find any decent collections of verses or passages that I could extract the data from (I even asked ChatGPT) but I did find an interesting source in OpenBible's Topical Bible. The references should hopefully lead to verses/passages that are more helpful then the one above. The references are provided in a text file here and the format of the references was in a format that the ESV API can work with by default.

I've massaged the data a bit to remove all but the verse/passage references, and then removed any duplicates. Rather hilariously to me at least this gives me a list of readings enough for 12,686 days! That'll take me through till when I'm 66!!

Anyway, I've included this file in the repository, it's named openbible_topical_bible_readings.txt. It's been shuffled into a random order, and I've then taken the first 365 lines from that file and added a dates column to get my verses for "year 1".

I run the script at 9am every morning via a simple cron job on my home server.

0 9 * * * /usr/bin/docker run --rm --env TZ=Europe/London --volume /srv/data-01/my/files/code/verse-of-the-day:/app jakepricedev/docker-pyrunner:latest python3 main.py

That sends a notification to Telegram, and I'll get a notification that I can view.