Introduction

This application updates a Mac's lock screen message with a daily quote from https://quotes.rest/ (currently gets a quote from the life category).

A Python script is written to fetch the quote from the API and write it to a txt file. A shell script calls the command to set the lock screen message to what's contained in the txt file.

Two approaches were taken- one using an Automator app and one using crontab.

First steps

Update the file locations in each file to be relevant to your system's paths.

Setup Instructions

Using the Automator app

LockScreenQuotes can be run manually using the Mac's Automator applications.

To have the application run on startup, go to System Preferences -> User & Groups -> Login Items, and add LockScreenQuotes as an item.

Using crontab

The crontab solution is set up to run at minute 0 of each hour.

Open a terminal and type in sudo crontab -e, which will open up a vim editor. Press i to go into insert mode. Paste the contents of LockScreenQuotesCrontab.txt into to the editor. Type :wq to exit the editor.