DEV Community: Bruce

Simplifying Video Downloads from Wistia

Bruce — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 11:26:58 +0000

GitHub Repository: wisty
Pypi: wisty

In this small article, we will explore Wisty, a command line tool designed to swiftly download videos hosted on Wistia written in python and open sourced. With Wisty, you can effortlessly save Wistia videos to your local machine in just a few simple steps.

Getting Started:

To begin, you'll need to have Python installed on your system. Once Python is set up, you can easily install Wisty by running the following command:



pip install wisty

Downloading Videos from Wistia:

1. Obtain the Video ID:

Right-click on the Wistia video you want to download.
Select "Copy link and Thumbnail."
Paste the link into a text file reader.
Locate the video ID, which will be labeled as "wvideo" followed by a value.
Copy the video ID value for later use.

2. Download the Video:

Open your command line or terminal.
Run the following command, replacing video_id with the actual video ID you obtained earlier:



wisty download <video_id>

Wisty will initiate the download process, and the video will be saved to your current working directory.

Example:

Let's say you want to download a video with the ID 123abc. You would execute the following command:



wisty download 123abc

Wisty will then swiftly retrieve the video from Wistia and save it to your local machine.

Conclusion:

Wisty simplifies the process of downloading Wistia videos by providing a minimalistic and efficient command line interface. With just a video ID, you can quickly retrieve and save Wistia videos to your local machine hassle-free.

Give Wisty a try today, and enjoy the ease and convenience it brings to downloading Wistia videos!

GitHub Repository: wisty
Pypi: wisty

How to download courses from Linkedin Learning with python

Bruce — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:41:21 +0000

In this tutorial we will see how to download Linkedin learning courses with a simple cli tool. Just a quick setup and you will be able to download videos and courses.

Prerequisites

We will need Python3.

Python 3

Now, what's next?

Open your terminal or command line and download a python package from PyPi called llvd which stands for Linkedin Learning Video Downloader

$ pip install llvd

If you have multiple versions of python installed in your system, use pip3 instead.




    $ llvd --help

If the above command does not fail, you can continue with the tutorial

To download a course:

Log in to the Linkedin Learning app.
Search for any course.
Navigate to the course of your choice.
Copy its slug.

Open your terminal or command line.
Copy the command given below and replace course-slug with your copied course slug and run it




    $ llvd -c "course-slug" -r 720

llvd creates separate folders for each course you download, groups all videos by chapters, and renames all downloaded videos with video names so that they will be ordered properly.

To download a course you have to specify its name (-c flag ).

How it looks like in action

Available features with this tool

Cookie-based authentication
Download a course and all its exercises
Group videos by chapters
Ability to download video subtitles(by specifying --caption flag)
Ability to resume failed downloads
Option to choose video format (360p, 540p, 720p) using -r flag

Cookie-based Authentication

Click on the options in google chrome (top right with 3 vertical dots).
After this, click on more tools followed by Developer Tools (you can also reach here by using the keyboard combination — ctrl+shift+I).
Now once you’ve gained access to the developer tools, navigate to the Application tab, and copy the value of two cookies from there named li_at and JSESSIONID respectively.
Create a cookies.txt file to a place you want to download your courses then paste in the values of li_at and JSESSIONID as shown below.



  li_at=xxxxx
  JSESSIONID="ajax:xxxxxx"




      $ llvd -c "course-slug" -r 720 --cookies

Download the course with subtitles

Use the --caption flag to download videos with subtitles




    $ llvd -c "course-slug" -r 720 --caption



$ llvd -c "course-slug" -r 720 -ca

Wrapping up

If you liked this tutorial you might as well head over to Github and leave a star to this awesome open source project llvd

Thanks for reading 😊!

How to setup secure subdomains using nginx and certbot on a VPS

Bruce — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 18:29:16 +0000

Did you know that you can host as many subdomains as you want thanks to nginx on a VPS?

Well if you don't know how to do that, reading this tutorial is going to help you setup subdomains assuming that you already have a domain setup already.

Here's the general assumption for this setup:

Ubuntu server
A fully registered domain name: example.com (use your real domain name)
Subdomain names: dashboard.example.com, shop.example.com

Before starting this tutorial, first thing you've to do is to point all your subdomains to your server’s public IP address via your DNS provider (edit A, CNAME).

I am using DigitalOcean because of how easy it is to get started. If you can sign up on DigitalOcean with my Referral Link you get $100 in credit that can be spent in 60 days.

Well enough with talking let's jump straight to it:

1 - SSH into your VPS

$ ssh user@hostname

2 - Install and start nginx

Use the following command to install nginx on your VPS

$ sudo apt install nginx

# start nginx service

$ sudo systemctl start nginx

3 - Setup the test directories for each subdomain

Up until now, all the subdomains have set up correctly but there is one huge problem, all are pointing to the same page. We need to separate these subdomains to point to their own pages. For this, i'm going to setup test directories and html pages.

Creating directories for each subdomain

$ cd /var/www

$ sudo mkdir shop.example.com dashboard.example.com

Creating simple html pages for each


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
        <title>Example.com</title>
    </head>

    <body>
        <h1>It works</h1>
    </body>

</html>

Copy and paste the code above in each of the html files


$ sudo nano shop.example.com/index.html
$ sudo nano dashboard.example.com/index.html

4 - Creating server blocks for each subdomain


cd /etc/nginx/sites-available

Inside /etc/nginx/sites-available. We are going to create server block for each subdomains and do modifications for each.We are also going to create symbolic link of each file


$ sudo nano dashboard.example.com

Copy and paste the configurations given below


## For dashboard.example.com subdomain
server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;
        root /var/www/dashboard.example.com;
        index index.html;
        server_name dashboard.example.com www.dashboard.example.com;
}

Make a symbolic link



$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/dashboard.example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/dashboard.example.com

# do the same for the other subdomain

5 - Testing

$ sudo nginx -t
$ sudo systemctl restart nginx

If you head over to each of the subdomains in your browser you are going to see that it works but you notice that the browser is screaming at you that there is no ssl certificate

Hold on, we are going to fix that, plus there is a bonus..so keep on reading

6 - Install Certbot and generate SSL Certificate


$ sudo apt install -y certbot

# stop nginx service, this is a must
$ sudo systemctl stop nginx

# generate an ssl certificate
$ sudo certbot certonly -d shop.example.com -d dashboard.example.com

Hit enter and you are going to see this menu of options

How would you like to authenticate with the ACME CA?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1: Nginx Web Server plugin (nginx)
2: Spin up a temporary webserver (standalone)
3: Place files in webroot directory (webroot)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Select the appropriate number [1-3] then [enter] (press 'c' to cancel): 2

Choose the second option and press ENTER, that's it .Now we have to do one more last thing and we are done. We need to tell nginx how to handle non secure connections.

7 - Redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS


$ cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
$ sudo nano dashboard.example.com

Update the server block with these configurations


# dashboard.example.com subdomain server block
server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name dashboard.example.com www.dashboard.example.com;
    error_page 497 https://dashboard.example.com$request_uri;
    return 301 https://dashboard.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    root /var/www/dashboard.example.com;
    index index.html index.htm;
    server_name www.dashboard.example.com;

    # ssl configuration;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/dashboard.example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/dashboard.example.com/privkey.pem;

    return 301 https:/dashboard.example.com$request_uri;
}
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    root /var/www/dashboard.example.com;
    index index.html index.htm;

    # ssl configuration;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/dashboard.example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/dashboard.example.com/privkey.pem;
}

# do the same for the other subdomain file and make sure you replace subdomain name

You notice in the server block we are telling nginx where to look for our generated ssl certificate key and i have also added www redirection configurations as a bonus 😉!

Make sure to add an A record with www.dashboard.example.com and www.shop.example.com pointing to your server’s public IP address.

8 - Test again and Restart nginx service

$ sudo nginx -t
$ sudo systemctl restart nginx

And there you have it. Our nginx server is redirecting all www traffic to non-www over SSL. The configuration is also telling nginx to redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS to make sure we are secure.

Thank you for reading!

Your comments are welcome

How to setup continuous deployment of a website on a VPS using GitHub Actions

Bruce — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 09:08:55 +0000

Doesn't matter if it is a private or public repository

Prerequisites

Here are the prerequisites required for this tutorial:

A GitHub account
Any Virtual Private Server, though i prefer DigitalOcean because of how easy it is to get started. If you can sign up on DigitalOcean with my Referral Link you get $100 in credit that can be spent in 60 days.

Some of the things we are going to cover in this tutorial.

Generating an ssh key on your remote VPS
Adding your generated public key to authorized keys
Creating GitHub secret keys
Configuring GitHub actions to auto-deploy your private/public repository

Step 1 - Open your terminal add ssh into your VPS



$ ssh user@hostname
$ cd ~/.ssh

Step 2 - Generate an ssh key



$  ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "test@example.com"

The email is the one you use on your GitHub account

Step 3: Press Enter repeatedly to set default name(Don't set a passphrase)

If you do "ls" in your terminal you will see these two files ( id_rsa and id_rsa.pub)

Step 4 - Add a public key to authorized keys



$  cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Note: We’re using >> so that the id_rsa.pub contents are appended to the end of the contents in the authorized_keys file, rather than override the contents in the authorized_keys.

Step 5 - Create GitHub secrets



$  cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa

In your terminal run the above command select the output content and copy to your clipboard.

Head over to your GitHub repository you wish to configure,click on settings tab then in options menu click on and add the following secrets:

HOST: set the key to your hostname or ip address.
USERNAME: set the key to the username you use to SSH into your VPS.
SSHKEY: set the key to you copied contents from the command above.
PORT: set the key to 22

If you are still here, congratulations! we are almost done!

With the steps above completed, we’re left with only a single step more, namely, our .github/workflows/deploy.yml file.

Step 6 - Configure GitHub actions to auto-deploy your private/public repository

Assuming that you have the repo cloned locally on your machine, go ahead and create .github/workflows folder and inside that create a deploy.yml file

Add the following contents to deploy.yml file



name: Deploy

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1

    - name: Copy repository contents via scp
      uses: appleboy/scp-action@master
      env:
        HOST: ${{ secrets.HOST }}
        USERNAME: ${{ secrets.USERNAME }}
        PORT: ${{ secrets.PORT }}
        KEY: ${{ secrets.SSHKEY }}
      with:
        source: "."
        target: "/var/www/mywebsite"

    - name: Executing remote command
      uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
      with:
        host: ${{ secrets.HOST }}
        USERNAME: ${{ secrets.USERNAME }}
        PORT: ${{ secrets.PORT }}
        KEY: ${{ secrets.SSHKEY }}
        script: ls

Notice that my remote command is just " ls ".if you are trying to auto deploy a React App or a Vue App, you could set your script command to Build command.

The Moment of Truth!

Commit the deploy.yml changes, and push to your repository.

It should build and push to the VPS without any errors.



$  git add .

$  git commit -m "deploy"

$  git push origin master

If you head over to your GitHub repository and click on actions menu you shall see this

Yay ! That's it, your repository is officially configured, now everytime you make changes and push to GitHub that action will run and auto deploy your website.

Thank you for reading!

Your comments are welcome