Crossposting to DevTo via command line

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Another week, another script in Haskell. It's probably clear that I've found a safe heaven where to play with functional concepts. I do the same at work. Do we need to automate something simple? Maybe just run once and forget it forever? No need to talk more, my fingers are already typing vim script.hs.

Two weeks ago we covered a script to scaffold a blog post. Last week we talked about tweeting a blog post from the command line. Today it's time to crosspost a local Jekyll-like blog post to dev.to.

Let's start from the core of the script, the crosspost function:

crosspost :: String -> String -> IO ()
crosspost apiKey path = do
--        ^ DevTo API key.
--               ^ Filepath to the blog post to crosspost.
  f <- Data.ByteString.readFile path
  case parseYamlFrontmatter f of
--     ^ Parse the frontmatter (and content) of the blog post to crosspost.
      Done postBS frontmatter -> do
--    ^ If the frontmatter (and content) was parsed successfully..
        let post = Data.ByteString.Char8.unpack postBS
        let json = toJSON $ mkDevPost path frontmatter post
--      ^ ..then create the JSON body for the DevTo endpoint and..
        let opts = defaults & Network.Wreq.header "api-key" .~ [Data.ByteString.Char8.pack apiKey]
                            & Network.Wreq.header "Content-Type" .~ [Data.ByteString.Char8.pack "application/json; charset=utf-8"]
        r <- Network.Wreq.postWith opts "https://dev.to/api/articles" json
--           ^ ..post the request to DevTo to create the blog post.
        print $ r ^. responseStatus
      e ->
        error $ show e
--      ^ ..else stop execution and display the error `e`.

Notice that the script uses wreq to perform the HTTP request. The library uses optics heavily (e.g. .~, ^.). We could have used any other library and avoided them easily.

The data sent to the DevTo endpoint is represented by the DevPost type:

-- `Front` is what we parse from the local blog post.
data Front =
  Front
    { title :: String
    , description :: String
    , tags :: [String]
    } deriving (Show, Generic, FromJSON)

-- `DevPost` is what we send to DevTo.
data DevPost =
  DevPost
    { title :: String
    , description :: String
    , tags :: [String]
    , canonical_url :: String
    , published :: Bool
    , body_markdown :: String
    } deriving (Show, Generic)

mkDevPost :: String -> Front -> String -> DevPost
mkDevPost path Front{..} post = DevPost{..}
--                  ^ Same as `{ title = title, description = description, tags = tags }`.
--                    Enabled by {-# LANGUAGE RecordWildCards #-}.
  where
    published = False
    body_markdown = post
    canonical_url = urlFor path

-- URL of the blog post on odone.io.
urlFor :: String -> String
urlFor path = fold [base, "/", name, ".html"]
  where
    base = "https://odone.io/posts"
    name = System.FilePath.Posix.takeBaseName path

We then use optparse-applicative to get the inputs needed from the command line. Its readme is awesome, so please refer to that to learn more.

main :: IO ()
main = uncurry crosspost =<< execParser opts
--                           ^ Parses the command line input and returns a tuple (String, String).
--     ^ `uncurry` converts a function on two arguments to a function expecting a tuple.
  where
    opts = info (parser <**> helper)
      (  fullDesc
      <> progDesc "Crossposts POST to DevTo"
      )

parser :: Options.Applicative.Parser (String, String)
parser = (,)
    <$>
      Options.Applicative.argument str
--    ^ The first mandatory argument is the API key to DevTo.
        (  metavar "API_KEY"
        <> help "API_KEY to post on DevTo"
        )
    <*>
      Options.Applicative.argument str
--    ^ The second mandatory argument is the path to the blog post to crosspost.
        (  metavar "POST"
        <> help "Path to blog POST to post on DevTo"
        )

With that in place, calling the script without the mandatory arguments we get:

$ ./todevto.hs
#
# Missing: API_KEY POST
#
# Usage: todevto.hs API_KEY POST
#   Crossposts POST to DevTo

We can also call it with --help to get a detailed explanation:

$ ./todevto.hs --help
#
# Usage: todevto.hs API_KEY POST
#   Crossposts POST to DevTo
#
# Available options:
#   API_KEY                  API_KEY to post on DevTo
#   POST                     Path to blog POST to post on DevTo
#   -h,--help                Show this help text

A proper call adds an unpublished blog post on DevTo with all the following filled properly:

• title;
• description;
• tags;
• canonical_url (the URL of the post on odone.io);
• content.

The whole script is on GitHub.

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