softprops/devtogo

👩🏽‍💻🎒 a dev.to tool for the road

👩🏽‍💻🎒

devtogo

a dev.to tool for the road🧳

devtogo is a cli for publishing offline markdown files to dev.to.

💾 install

🍻 Homebrew (osx)

$ brew install softprops/tools/devtogo

📦 Cargo

$ cargo install devtogo

🚢 GitHub Releases

Using a version from this repo's GitHub Releases page, substitute a VERSION below with a valid release version

$ cd $HOME/bin
$ export VERSION=v0.1.0
$ curl -L "https://github.com/softprops/devtogo/releases/download/${VERSION}/devtogo-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m).tar.gz" \
  | tar -xz -C ~/bin

🤸‍♂️ usage

devtogo is a cli for publishing offline markdown files to dev.to. These files follow the same formatting rules documented in dev.to's editor guide.

At a bare minimum you'll want to declare a title in a frontmatter section of your markdown file.

---
title: my very first post
---

# hello everybody

To get started, you will first need to export an DEVTO_API_KEY environment variable. You can generate yours 👉here

$ export DEVTO_API_KEY='som3R@ndOmAp1K3y'

The most basic usage is to run the program inside the directory containing your target article content

$ devtogo

This will scan the current working directory for articles: markdown documents containing frontmatter describing metadata about the article. devtogo uses the title frontmatter field as a unique identifier to compare existing remote content.

When it can't resolve an article by title, it uploads it assuming it's a new article. When it can, it compares local and remote content and uploads local copy if the content of the local copy differs.

you can use the published frontmatter to indicate if and when an article should be published by default articles are saved as drafts only you can see. Setting published to true will publish articles. If you do this by accident you can set published back to false to revert a published an article if needed

To be more explicit you can provide a source argument which provides a path where content is stored.

$ devtogo --source path/to/content

You can also experiment without actually posting your content using the --dryrun flag. This will perform all operations except for uploading your content. This may be useful for validating your content.

$ devto --dryrun

You can always review the posts uploaded in your dev.to dashboard online

Doug Tangren (softprops) 2020

devtogo's Issues

add filter for file ext

because running in any random dir will inevitably result in something like this

$ devtogo --dryrun                                                                                                                                         
Error: stream did not contain valid UTF-8

improve api error ux

when making a request with a bad or invalid api key you get a very non-useful error message

DEVTO_API_KEY=badvalue devtogo -s posts
Error: error decoding response body: invalid type: map, expected a sequence at line 1 column 0

Caused by:
    invalid type: map, expected a sequence at line 1 column 0

lets fix that

Show publish status in output

It would be useful to know what is a draft and what will be published

Fails to POST article

Steps to recreate

1. Install with Cargo, or clone main and compile locally with cargo build.
2. Export a key for a Dev.to account, an account that contains an article that was created on Dev.to Web version.
3. Navigate to a directory that contains 4 articles, 3 that have previously been uploaded to Dev.to and 1 new article.
4. Run devtogo.
5. Expect Dev.to to return a 422 error.

Dev.to error: 422 {"error":"article param must be a JSON object. You provided article as NilClass","status":422}

Investigation

Have traced it to the POST operation and have removed the send and await from the POST request.

        async move {
            let resp = client
                .post("https://dev.to/api/articles")
                .header("api-key", api_key.as_str())
                .json(&CreateArticleInput {
                    body_markdown: content,
                });
            println!("{:?}", resp);
            Ok(())
            }

Which when printing returns the following without the article param.

RequestBuilder { method: POST, url: "https://dev.to/api/articles", headers: {"api-key": "API_KEY", "content-type": "application/json"} }

It looks like the POST is being made with no value for the article which is why Dev.to throws a nilclass error which is what Ruby does when a value is nil or doesn't exist.

When printing the content that is to be converted by the reqwest json feature

        let content2 = content.clone();
        println!("{}", content2);

It outputs the content without an issue.

---
title: Hello, World!
published: false
tags: discuss, help
series: Hello series
canonical_url: https://example.com/blog/hello
---

Hello DEV, this is my first post

Ideas about what to try next

• Check whether content.clone() is an issue
• Check Reqwest and the json feature maybe they have issues?