Duolingo streak preservation
Published: Jan 16, 2019
Reading time: 2 min
I’m a great fan of Duolingo, and while I have a number of issues with it I still consider it a generally useful platform for scratching the itch of learning a language.
One incentive they employ is to have a daily streak, indicating that you’ve maintained your practice for a certain number of days without slipping up once.
Now, for better or for worse, this streak is now something I take a humble amount of pride in. Some may consider it unsporting whereas others may consider it out and out cheating, but once you’ve amassed a certain number of lingots the streak can be maintained near indefinitely.
The project we’re using to achieve this is the comprehensive Unofficial Duolingo API.
Firstly, you want to clone this project into a folder, and then start a new text file in the same directory with the following contents:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import duolingo
lingo = duolingo.Duolingo('username', password='password')
lingo.buy_item('streak_freeze', 'nb')
The only values here than need altering are the username, password and language abbreviation code (nb for Norwegian Bokmål)
Cron
Then you’ll want to run the script regularly via cron which can be done by adding the below to your crontab with crontab -e, I run the above script a few times a day via cron just to make sure it runs. My line is as follows:
5 */8 * * * $HOME/bin/duolingo/auto.py
Where auto.py is the script you saved above. This will run the script every 8 hours (00:01, 08:01 and 16:01).
Docker
In the past, I’ve created a docker file for this, but I wouldn’t recommend using it via docker as failures are generally more silent via docker.