Because I have a couple of posts that I need/want to work on, and I have the time to work on them, I have of course decided to instead to update the theme on my blog because that was a way better use of my time 😂

Also, because the day is just too nice to not be sitting outside watching baseball (even if it's on TV ... and even if it's the ping of the bat and not the crack of the bat¹)

1. Since the MLB Lockout is still going on and there's no end in sight, I've resorted to watching NCAA Baseball. I have to say, it's really entertaining AND it seems like there's 100 games on each day! ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Sun 27 February 2022

Building my first Slack Bot

I had added a project to my OmniFocus database in November of 2021 which was, "Build a Slackbot" after watching a Video by Mason Egger. I had hoped that I would be able to spend some time on it over the holidays, but I was never able to really find the time.

A few weeks ago, Bob Belderbos tweeted:

If you were to build a Slack bot, what would it do?

— Bob Belderbos (@bbelderbos) February 2, 2022

And I responded

I work in US Healthcare where there are a lot of Acronyms (many of which are used in tech but have different meaning), so my slack bot would allow a user to enter an acronym and return what it means, i.e., CMS = Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

— The B Is Silent (@ryancheley) February 2, 2022

I didn't really have anymore time now than I did over the holiday, but Bob asking and me answering pushed me to actually write the darned thing.

I think one of the problems I encountered was what backend / tech stack to use. I'm familiar with Django, but going from 0 to something in production has a few steps and although I know how to do them ... I just felt ~overwhelmed~ by the prospect.

I felt equally ~overwhelmed~ by the prospect of trying FastAPI to create the API or Flask, because I am not as familiar with their deployment story.

Another thing that was different now than before was that I had worked on a Django Cookie Cutter to use and that was 'good enough' to try it out. So I did.

I ran into a few problems while working with my Django Cookie Cutter but I fixed them and then dove head first into writing the Slack Bot

The model

The initial implementation of the model was very simple ... just 2 fields:

class Acronym(models.Model):
    acronym = models.CharField(max_length=8)
    definition = models.TextField()

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.acronym = self.acronym.lower()
        super(Acronym, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

    class Meta:
        unique_together = ("acronym", "definition")
        ordering = ["acronym"]

    def __str__(self) -> str:
        return self.acronym

Next I created the API using Django Rest Framework using a single serializer

class AcronymSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Acronym
        fields = [
            "id",
            "acronym",
            "definition",
        ]

which is used by a single view

class AcronymViewSet(viewsets.ReadOnlyModelViewSet):
    serializer_class = AcronymSerializer
    queryset = Acronym.objects.all()

    def get_object(self):
        queryset = self.filter_queryset(self.get_queryset())
        print(self.kwargs["acronym"])
        acronym = self.kwargs["acronym"]
        obj = get_object_or_404(queryset, acronym__iexact=acronym)

        return obj

and exposed on 2 end points:

from django.urls import include, path

from .views import AcronymViewSet, AddAcronym, CountAcronyms, Events

app_name = "api"

user_list = AcronymViewSet.as_view({"get": "list"})
user_detail = AcronymViewSet.as_view({"get": "retrieve"})

urlpatterns = [
    path("", AcronymViewSet.as_view({"get": "list"}), name="acronym-list"),
    path("<acronym>/", AcronymViewSet.as_view({"get": "retrieve"}), name="acronym-detail"),
    path("api-auth/", include("rest_framework.urls", namespace="rest_framework")),
]

Getting the data

At my joby-job we use Jira and Confluence. In one of our Confluence spaces we have a Glossary page which includes nearly 200 acronyms. I had two choices:

1. Copy and Paste the acronym and definition for each item
2. Use Python to get the data

I used Python to get the data, via a Jupyter Notebook, but I didn't seem to save the code anywhere (🤦🏻), so I can't include it here. But trust me, it was 💯.

Setting up the Slack Bot

Although I had watched Mason's video, since I was building this with Django I used this article as a guide in the development of the code below.

The code from my views.py is below:

ssl_context = ssl.create_default_context()
ssl_context.check_hostname = False
ssl_context.verify_mode = ssl.CERT_NONE

SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN = getattr(settings, "SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN", None)
SLACK_BOT_USER_TOKEN = getattr(settings, "SLACK_BOT_USER_TOKEN", None)
CONFLUENCE_LINK = getattr(settings, "CONFLUENCE_LINK", None)
client = slack.WebClient(SLACK_BOT_USER_TOKEN, ssl=ssl_context)

class Events(APIView):
    def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):

        slack_message = request.data

        if slack_message.get("token") != SLACK_VERIFICATION_TOKEN:
            return Response(status=status.HTTP_403_FORBIDDEN)

        # verification challenge
        if slack_message.get("type") == "url_verification":
            return Response(data=slack_message, status=status.HTTP_200_OK)
        # greet bot
        if "event" in slack_message:
            event_message = slack_message.get("event")

            # ignore bot's own message
            if event_message.get("subtype"):
                return Response(status=status.HTTP_200_OK)

            # process user's message
            user = event_message.get("user")
            text = event_message.get("text")
            channel = event_message.get("channel")
            url = f"https://slackbot.ryancheley.com/api/{text}/"
            response = requests.get(url).json()
            definition = response.get("definition")
            if definition:
                message = f"The acronym '{text.upper()}' means: {definition}"
            else:
                confluence = CONFLUENCE_LINK + f'/dosearchsite.action?cql=siteSearch+~+"{text}"'
                confluence_link = f"<{confluence}|Confluence>"
                message = f"I'm sorry <@{user}> I don't know what *{text.upper()}* is :shrug:. Try checking {confluence_link}."

            if user != "U031T0UHLH1":
                client.chat_postMessage(
                    blocks=[{"type": "section", "text": {"type": "mrkdwn", "text": message}}], channel=channel
                )
                return Response(status=status.HTTP_200_OK)
        return Response(status=status.HTTP_200_OK)

Essentially what the Slack Bot does is takes in the request.data['text'] and checks it against the DRF API end point to see if there is a matching Acronym.

If there is, then it returns the acronym and it's definition.

If it's not, you get a message that it's not sure what you're looking for, but that maybe Confluence¹ can help, and gives a link to our Confluence Search page.

The last thing you'll notice is that if the User has a specific ID it won't respond with a message. That's because in my initial testing I just had the Slack Bot replying to the user saying 'Hi' with a 'Hi' back to the user.

I had a missing bit of logic though, so once you said hi to the Slack Bot, it would reply back 'Hi' and then keep replying 'Hi' because it was talking to itself. It was comical to see in real time 😂.

Using ngrok to test it locally

ngrok is a great tool for taking a local url, like localhost:8000/api/entpoint, and exposing it on the internet with a url like https://a123-45-678-901-234.ngrok.io/api/entpoint. This allows you to test your local code and see any issues that might arise when pushed to production.

As I mentioned above the Slack Bot continually said "Hi" to itself in my initial testing. Since I was running ngrok to serve up my local Server I was able to stop the infinite loop by stopping my local web server. This would have been a little more challenging if I had to push my code to an actual web server first and then tested.

Conclusion

This was such a fun project to work on, and I'm really glad that Bob tweeted asking what Slack Bot we would build.

That gave me the final push to actually build it.

1. You'll notice that I'm using an environment variable to define the Confluence Link and may wonder why. It's mostly to keep the actual Confluence Link used at work non-public and not for any other reason 🤷🏻 ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Sat 19 February 2022

In this final post I'll be writing up how everything fits together. As a recap, here are the steps I go through to create and publish a new post

Create Post

1. Create .md for my new post
2. write my words
3. edit post
4. Change status from draft to published

Publish Post

1. Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool¹
2. Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
3. Run git add <filename> to add post to be committed to GitHub
4. Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub
5. Post to Twitter with a link to my new post

My previous posts have gone over how each step was automated, but now we'll 'throw it all together'.

I updated my Makefile with a new command:

tweet:
    ./tweet.sh

When I run make tweet it will calls tweet.sh. I wrote about the tweet.sh file in Auto Generating the Commit Message so I won't go deeply into here. What it does is automate steps 1 - 5 above for the Publish Post section above.

And that's it really. I've now been able to automate the file creation and publish process.

Admittedly these are the 'easy' parts. The hard part is the actual writing, but it does remove a ton pf potential friction from my workflow and this will hopefully lead to more writing this year.

1. make vercel actually runs make html so this isn't really a step that I need to do. ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Wed 09 February 2022

In my last post Auto Generating the Commit Message I indicated that this post I would "throw it all together and to get a spot where I can run one make command that will do all of this for me".

I decided to take a brief detour though as I realized I didn't have a good way to create a new post, i.e. the starting point wasn't automated!

In this post I'm going to go over how I create the start to a new post using Makefile and the command make newpost

My initial idea was to create a new bash script (similar to the tweet.sh file), but as a first iteration I went in a different direction based on this post How to Slugify Strings in Bash.

The command that the is finally arrived at in the post above was

newpost:
    vim +':r templates/post.md' $(BASEDIR)/content/blog/$$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-$$(echo -n $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

which was really close to what I needed. My static site is set up a bit differently and I'm not using vim (I'm using VS Code) to write my words.

The first change I needed to make was to remove the use of vim from the command and instead use touch to create the file

newpost:
    touch $(BASEDIR)/content/blog/$$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-$$(echo -n $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

The second was to change the file path for where to create the file. As I've indicated previously, the structure of my content looks like this:

content
├── musings
├── pages
├── productivity
├── professional\ development
└── technology

giving me an updated version of the command that looks like this:

touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

When I run the command make newpost title='Automating the file creation' category='productivity' I get a empty new files created.

Now I just need to populate it with the data.

There are seven bits of meta data that need to be added, but four of them are the same for each post

Author: ryan
Tags:
Series: Remove if Not Needed
Status: draft

That allows me to have the newpost command look like this:

newpost:
    touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Author: ryan" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Tags: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Series: Remove if Not Needed"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Status: draft"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

The remaining metadata to be added are:

• Title:
• Date
• Slug

Of these, Date and Title are the most straightforward.

bash has a command called date that can be formatted in the way I want with %F. Using this I can get the date like this

echo "Date: $$(date +%F)" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

For Title I can take the input parameter title like this:

echo "Title: $${title}" > content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

Slug is just Title but slugified. Trying to figure out how to do this is how I found the article above.

Using a slightly modified version of the code that generates the file, we get this:

printf "Slug: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "$${title}" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

One thing to notice here is that printf. I needed/wanted to echo -n but make didn't seem to like that. This StackOverflow answer helped me to get a fix (using printf) though I'm sure there's a way I can get it to work with echo -n.

Essentially, since this was a first pass, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up re-writing this as a shell script I didn't want to spend too much time getting a perfect answer here.

OK, with all of that, here's the entire newpost recipe I'm using now:

newpost:
    touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Title: $${title}" > content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Date: $$(date +%F)" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Author: ryan" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Tags: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    printf "Slug: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "$${title}" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Series: Remove if Not Needed"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Status: draft"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

This allows me to type make newpost and generate a new file for me to start my new post in!¹

1. When this post was originally published the slug command didn't account for making all of the text lower case. This was fixed in a subsequent commit ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Wed 02 February 2022

In my first post of this series I outlined the steps needed in order for me to post. They are:

1. Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool¹
2. Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
3. Run git add <filename> to add post to be committed to GitHub
4. Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub
5. Post to Twitter with a link to my new post

In this post I'll be focusing on how I automated step 4, Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub.

Automating the "git commit ..." part of my workflow

In order for my GitHub Action to auto post to Twitter, my commit message needs to be in the form of "New Post: ...". What I'm looking for is to be able to have the commit message be something like this:

New Post: Great New Post https://ryancheley.com/yyyy/mm/dd/great-new-post/

This is basically just three parts from the markdown file, the Title, the Date, and the Slug.

In order to get those details, I need to review the structure of the markdown file. For Pelican writing in markdown my file is structured like this:

Title:
Date:
Tags:
Slug:
Series:
Authors:
Status:

My words start here and go on for a bit.

In the last post I wrote about how to git add the files in the content directory. Here, I want to take the file that was added to git and get the first 7 rows, i.e. the details from Title to Status.

The file that was updated that needs to be added to git can be identified by running

find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' | xargs git add

Running git status now will display which file was added with the last command and you'll see something like this:

❯ git status
On branch main
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        content/productivity/auto-generating-the-commit-message.md

What I need though is a more easily parsable output. Enter the porcelin flag which, per the docs

Give the output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. This is similar to the short output, but will remain stable across Git versions and regardless of user configuration. See below for details.

which is exactly what I needed.

Running git status --porcelain you get this:

❯ git status --porcelain
?? content/productivity/more-writing-automation.md

Now, I just need to get the file path and exclude the status (the ?? above in this case²), which I can by piping in the results and using sed

❯ git status --porcelain | sed s/^...//
content/productivity/more-writing-automation.md

The sed portion says

• search the output string starting at the beginning of the line (^)
• find the first three characters (...). ³
• replace them with nothing (//)

There are a couple of lines here that I need to get the content of for my commit message:

• Title
• Slug
• Date
• Status⁴

I can use head to get the first n lines of a file. In this case, I need the first 7 lines of the output from git status --porcelain | sed s/^...//. To do that, I pipe it to head!

git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7

That command will return this:

Title: Auto Generating the Commit Message
Date: 2022-01-24
Tags: Automation
Slug: auto-generating-the-commit-message
Series: Auto Deploying my Words
Authors: ryan
Status: draft

In order to get the Title, I'll pipe this output to grep to find the line with Title

git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: '

which will return this

Title: Auto Generating the Commit Message

Now I just need to remove the leading Title: and I've got the title I'm going to need for my Commit message!

git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: ' | sed -e 's/Title: //g'

which return just

Auto Generating the Commit Message

I do this for each of the parts I need:

• Title
• Slug
• Date
• Status

Now, this is getting to have a lot of parts, so I'm going to throw it into a bash script file called tweet.sh. The contents of the file look like this:

TITLE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: ' | sed -e 's/Title: //g'`
SLUG=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Slug: ' | sed -e 's/Slug: //g'`
POST_DATE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Date: ' | sed -e 's/Date: //g' | head -c 10 | grep '-' | sed -e 's/-/\//g'`
POST_STATUS=` git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Status: ' | sed -e 's/Status: //g'`

You'll see above that the Date piece is a little more complicated, but it's just doing a find and replace on the - to update them to / for the URL.

Now that I've got all of the pieces I need, it's time to start putting them together

I define a new variable called URL and set it

URL="https://ryancheley.com/$POST_DATE/$SLUG/"

and the commit message

MESSAGE="New Post: $TITLE $URL"

Now, all I need to do is wrap this in an if statement so the command only runs when the STATUS is published

if [ $POST_STATUS = "published" ]
then
    MESSAGE="New Post: $TITLE $URL"

    git commit -m "$MESSAGE"

    git push github main
fi

Putting this all together (including the git add from my previous post) and the tweet.sh file looks like this:

# Add the post to git
find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' | xargs git add


# Get the parts needed for the commit message
TITLE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: ' | sed -e 's/Title: //g'`
SLUG=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Slug: ' | sed -e 's/Slug: //g'`
POST_DATE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Date: ' | sed -e 's/Date: //g' | head -c 10 | grep '-' | sed -e 's/-/\//g'`
POST_STATUS=` git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Status: ' | sed -e 's/Status: //g'`

URL="https://ryancheley.com/$POST_DATE/$SLUG/"

if [ $POST_STATUS = "published" ]
then
    MESSAGE="New Post: $TITLE $URL"

    git commit -m "$MESSAGE"

    git push github main
fi

When this script is run it will find an updated or added markdown file (i.e. article) and add it to git. It will then parse the file to get data about the article. If the article is set to published it will commit the file with a message and will push to github. Once at GitHub, the Tweeting action I wrote about will tweet my commit message!

In the next (and last) article, I'm going to throw it all together and to get a spot when I can run one make command that will do all of this for me.

Caveats

The script above works, but if you have multiple articles that you're working on at the same time, it will fail pretty spectacularly. The final version of the script has guards against that and looks like this

1. make vercel actually runs make html so this isn't really a step that I need to do. ↩︎
2. Other values could just as easily be M or A ↩︎
3. Why the first three characters, because that's how porcelain outputs the status ↩︎
4. I will also need the Status to do some conditional logic otherwise I may have a post that is in draft status that I want to commit and the GitHub Action will run posting a tweet with an article and URL that don't actually exist yet. ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Fri 28 January 2022

In my last post I mentioned the steps needed in order for me to post. They are:

1. Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool¹
2. Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
3. Run git add <filename> to add post to be committed to GitHub
4. Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub
5. Post to Twitter with a link to my new post

In that post I focused on number 5, posting to Twitter with a link to the post using GitHub Actions.

In this post I'll be focusing on how I automated step 3, "Run git add <filename> to add post to be committed to GitHub".

Automating the git add ... part of my workflow

I have my pelican content set up so that the category of a post is determined by the directory a markdown file is placed in. The structure of my content folder looks like this:

content
├── musings
├── pages
├── productivity
├── professional\ development
└── technology

If you just just git status on a directory it will give you the status of all of the files in that directory that have been changed, added, removed. Something like this:

❯ git status
On branch main
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        content/productivity/more-writing-automation.md
        Makefile
        metadata.json

That means that when you run git add . all of those files will be added to git. For my purposes all that I need is the one updated file in the content directory.

The command find does a great job of taking a directory and allowing you to search for what you want in that directory. You can run something like

find content -name '*.md' -print

And it will return essentially what you're looking for. Something like this:

content/pages/404.md
content/pages/curriculum-vitae.md
content/pages/about.md
content/pages/brag.md
content/productivity/adding-the-new-file.md
content/productivity/omnifocus-3.md
content/productivity/making-the-right-choice-or-how-i-learned-to-live-with-limiting-my-own-technical-debt-and-just-be-happy.md
content/productivity/auto-tweeting-new-post.md
content/productivity/my-outlook-review-process.md
content/productivity/rules-and-actions-in-outlook.md
content/productivity/auto-generating-the-commit-message.md
content/productivity/declaring-omnifocus-bankrupty.md

However, because one of my categories has a space in it's name (professional development) if you pipe the output of this to xargs git add it fails with the error

fatal: pathspec 'content/professional' did not match any files

In order to get around this, you need to surround the output of the results of find with double quotes ("). You can do this by using sed

find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g'

What this says is, take the output of find and pipe it to sed and use a global find and replace to add a " to the start of the line (that's what the ^ does) and then pipe that to sed again and use a global find and replace to add a " to the end of the line (that's what the '$' does).

Now, when you run

find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g'

The output looks like this:

"content/pages/404.md"
"content/pages/curriculum-vitae.md"
"content/pages/about.md"
"content/pages/brag.md"
"content/productivity/adding-the-new-file.md"
"content/productivity/omnifocus-3.md"
"content/productivity/making-the-right-choice-or-how-i-learned-to-live-with-limiting-my-own-technical-debt-and-just-be-happy.md"
"content/productivity/auto-tweeting-new-post.md"
"content/productivity/my-outlook-review-process.md"
"content/productivity/rules-and-actions-in-outlook.md"
"content/productivity/auto-generating-the-commit-message.md"
"content/productivity/declaring-omnifocus-bankrupty.md"

Now, you can pipe your output to xargs git add and there is no error!

The final command looks like this:

find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' | xargs git add

In the next post, I'll walk through how I generate the commit message to be used in the automatic tweet!

1. make vercel actually runs make html so this isn't really a step that I need to do. ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Wed 26 January 2022

Each time I write something for this site there are several steps that I go through to make sure that the post makes it's way to where people can see it.

1. Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool¹
2. Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
3. Run git add <filename> to add post to be committed to GitHub
4. Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub
5. Post to Twitter with a link to my new post

If there's more than 2 things to do, I'm totally going to forget to do one of them.

The above steps are all automat-able, but the one I wanted to tackle first was the automated tweet. Last night I figured out how to tweet with a GitHub action.

There were a few things to do to get the auto tweet to work:

1. Find a GitHub in the Market Place that did the auto tweet (or try to write one if I couldn't find one)
2. Set up a twitter app with Read and Write privileges
3. Set the necessary secrets for the report (API Key, API Key Secret, Access Token, Access Token Secret, Bearer)
4. Test the GitHub Action

The action I chose was send-tweet-action. It's got easy to read documentation on what is needed. Honestly the hardest part was getting a twitter app set up with Read and Write privileges.

I'm still not sure how to do it, honestly. I was lucky enough that I already had an app sitting around with Read and Write from the WordPress blog I had previously, so I just regenerated the keys for that one and used them.

The last bit was just testing the action and seeing that it worked as expected. It was pretty cool running an action and then seeing a tweet in my timeline.

The TIL for this was that GitHub Actions can have conditionals. This is important because I don't want to generate a new tweet each time I commit to main. I only want that to happen when I have a new post.

To do that, you just need this in the GitHub Action:

    if: "contains(github.event.head_commit.message, '<String to Filter on>')"

In my case, the <String to Filter on> is New Post:.

The send-tweet-action has a status field which is the text tweeted. I can use the github.event.head_commit.message in the action like this:

    ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}

Now when I have a commit message that starts 'New Post:' against main I'll have a tweet get sent out too!

This got me to thinking that I can/should automate all of these steps.

With that in mind, I'm going to work on getting the process down to just having to run a single command. Something like:

    make publish "New Post: Title of my Post https://www.ryancheley.com/yyyy/mm/dd/slug/"

1. make vercel actually runs make html so this isn't really a step that I need to do. ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Mon 24 January 2022

Last summer I migrated my blog from Wordpress to Pelican. I did this for a couple of reasons (see my post here), but one thing that I was a bit worried about when I migrated was that Pelican's offering for site search didn't look promising.

There was an outdated plugin called tipue-search but when I was looking at it I could tell it was on it's last legs.

I thought about it, and since my blag isn't super high trafficked AND you can use google to search a specific site, I could wait a bit and see what options came up.

After waiting a few months, I decided it would be interesting to see if I could write a SQLite utility to get the data from my blog, add it to a SQLite database and then use datasette to serve it up.

I wrote the beginning scaffolding for it last August in a utility called pelican-to-sqlite, but I ran into several technical issues I just couldn't overcome. I thought about giving up, but sometimes you just need to take a step away from a thing, right?

After the first of the year I decided to revisit my idea, but first looked to see if there was anything new for Pelican search. I found a tool plugin called search that was released last November and is actively being developed, but as I read through the documentation there was just A LOT of stuff:

• stork
• requirements for the structure of your page html
• static asset hosting
• deployment requires updating your nginx settings

These all looked a bit scary to me, and since I've done some work using datasette I thought I'd revisit my initial idea.

My First Attempt

As I mentioned above, I wrote the beginning scaffolding late last summer. In my first attempt I tried to use a few tools to read the md files and parse their yaml structure and it just didn't work out. I also realized that Pelican can have reStructured Text and that any attempt to parse just the md file would never work for those file types.

My Second Attempt

The Plugin

During the holiday I thought a bit about approaching the problem from a different perspective. My initial idea was to try and write a datasette style package to read the data from pelican. I decided instead to see if I could write a pelican plugin to get the data and then add it to a SQLite database. It turns out, I can, and it's not that hard.

Pelican uses signals to make plugin in creation a pretty easy thing. I read a post and the documentation and was able to start my effort to refactor pelican-to-sqlite.

From The missing Pelican plugins guide I saw lots of different options, but realized that the signal article_generator_write_article is what I needed to get the article content that I needed.

I then also used sqlite_utils to insert the data into a database table.

def save_items(record: dict, table: str, db: sqlite_utils.Database) -> None:  # pragma: no cover
    db[table].insert(record, pk="slug", alter=True, replace=True)

Below is the method I wrote to take the content and turn it into a dictionary which can be used in the save_items method above.

def create_record(content) -> dict:
    record = {}
    author = content.author.name
    category = content.category.name
    post_content = html2text.html2text(content.content)
    published_date = content.date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
    slug = content.slug
    summary = html2text.html2text(content.summary)
    title = content.title
    url = "https://www.ryancheley.com/" + content.url
    status = content.status
    if status == "published":
        record = {
            "author": author,
            "category": category,
            "content": post_content,
            "published_date": published_date,
            "slug": slug,
            "summary": summary,
            "title": title,
            "url": url,
        }
    return record

Putting these together I get a method used by the Pelican Plugin system that will generate the data I need for the site AND insert it into a SQLite database

def run(_, content):
    record = create_record(content)
    save_items(record, "content", db)

def register():
    signals.article_generator_write_article.connect(run)

The html template update

I use a custom implementation of Smashing Magazine. This allows me to do some edits, though I mostly keep it pretty stock. However, this allowed me to make a small edit to the base.html template to include a search form.

In order to add the search form I added the following code to base.html below the nav tag:

    <section class="relative h-8">
    <section class="absolute inset-y-0 right-10 w-128">
    <form
    class = "pl-4"
    <
    action="https://search-ryancheley.vercel.app/pelican/article_search?text=name"
    method="get">
            <label for="site-search">Search the site:</label>
            <input type="search" id="site-search" name="text"
                    aria-label="Search through site content">
            <button class="rounded-full w-16 hover:bg-blue-300">Search</button>
    </form>
    </section>

Putting it all together with datasette and Vercel

Here's where the magic starts. Publishing data to Vercel with datasette is extremely easy with the datasette plugin datasette-publish-vercel.

You do need to have the Vercel cli installed, but once you do, the steps for publishing your SQLite database is really well explained in the datasette-publish-vercel documentation.

One final step to do was to add a MAKE command so I could just type a quick command which would create my content, generate the SQLite database AND publish the SQLite database to Vercel. I added the below to my Makefile:

vercel:
    { \
    echo "Generate content and database"; \
    make html; \
    echo "Content generation complete"; \
    echo "Publish data to vercel"; \
    datasette publish vercel pelican.db --project=search-ryancheley --metadata metadata.json; \
    echo "Publishing complete"; \
    }

The line

datasette publish vercel pelican.db --project=search-ryancheley --metadata metadata.json; \

has an extra flag passed to it (--metadata) which allows me to use metadata.json to create a saved query which I call article_search. The contents of that saved query are:

select summary as 'Summary', url as 'URL', published_date as 'Published Data' from content where content like '%' || :text || '%' order by published_date

This is what allows the action in the form above to have a URL to link to in datasette and return data!

With just a few tweaks I'm able to include a search tool, powered by datasette for my pelican blog. Needless to say, I'm pretty pumped.

Next Steps

There are still a few things to do:

1. separate search form html file (for my site)
2. formatting datasette to match site (for my vercel powered instance of datasette)
3. update the README for pelican-to-sqlite package to better explain how to fully implement
4. Get pelican-to-sqlite added to the pelican-plugins page

Posted by ryan on Sun 16 January 2022

At the beginning of November Adam Johnson tweeted

I’ve come up with a test that we can use to decide whether a new package we’re considering depending on is well-maintained.

and linked to an article he wrote.

He came up (with the help of Twitter) twelve questions to ask of any library that you're looking at:

1. Is it described as “production ready”?
2. Is there sufficient documentation?
3. Is there a changelog?
4. Is someone responding to bug reports?
5. Are there sufficient tests?
6. Are the tests running with the latest <Language> version?
7. Are the tests running with the latest <Integration> version?
8. Is there a Continuous Integration (CI) configuration?
9. Is the CI passing?
10. Does it seem relatively well used?
11. Has there been a commit in the last year?
12. Has there been a release in the last year?

I thought it would be interesting to turn that checklist into a Click App using Simon Willison's Click App Cookiecutter.

I set out in earnest to do just that on November 8th.

What started out as just a simple Click app, quickly turned in a pretty robust CLI using Will McGugan's Rich library.

I started by using the GitHub API to try and answer the questions, but quickly found that it couldn't answer them all. Then I cam across the PyPI API which helped to answer almost all of them programmatically.

There's still a bit of work to do to get it where I want it to, but it's pretty sweet that I can now run a simple command and review the output to see if the package is well maintained.

You can even try it on the package I wrote!

the-well-maintained-test https://github.com/ryancheley/the-well-maintained-test

Which will return (as of this writing) the output below:

1. Is it described as 'production ready'?
        The project is set to Development Status Beta
2. Is there sufficient documentation?
        Documentation can be found at
https://github.com/ryancheley/the-well-maintained-test/blob/main/README.md
3. Is there a changelog?
        Yes
4. Is someone responding to bug reports?
        The maintainer took 0 days to respond to the bug report
        It has been 2 days since a comment was made on the bug.
5. Are there sufficient tests? [y/n]: y
        Yes
6. Are the tests running with the latest Language version?
        The project supports the following programming languages
                - Python 3.7
                - Python 3.8
                - Python 3.9
                - Python 3.10

7. Are the tests running with the latest Integration version?
        This project has no associated frameworks
8. Is there a Continuous Integration (CI) configuration?
        There are 2 workflows
         - Publish Python Package
         - Test

9. Is the CI passing?
        Yes
10.  Does it seem relatively well used?
        The project has the following statistics:
        - Watchers: 0
        - Forks: 0
        - Open Issues: 1
        - Subscribers: 1
11.  Has there been a commit in the last year?
        Yes. The last commit was on 11-20-2021 which was 2 days ago
12. Has there been a release in the last year?
        Yes. The last commit was on 11-20-2021 which was 2 days ago

There is still one question that I haven't been able to answer programmatically with an API and that is:

Are there sufficient tests?

When that question comes up, you're prompted in the terminal to answer either y/n.

But, it does leave room for a fix by someone else!

Posted by ryan on Mon 22 November 2021

I have a side project I've been working on for a while now. One thing that happened overtime is that the styling of the site grew organically. I'm not a designer, and I didn't have a master set of templates or design principals guiding the development. I kind of hacked it together and made it look "nice enough"

That was until I really starting going from one page to another and realized that there styling of various pages wasn't just a little off ... but A LOT off.

As an aside, I'm using tailwind as my CSS Framework

I wanted to make some changes to the styling and realized I had two choices:

1. Manually go through each html template (the project is a Django project) and catalog the styles used for each element

OR

1. Try and write a bash command to do it for me

Well, before we jump into either choice, let's see how many templates there are to review!

As I said above, this is a Django project. I keep all of my templates in a single templates directory with each app having it's own sub directory.

I was able to use this one line to count the number of html files in the templates directory (and all of the sub directories as well)

ls -R templates | grep html | wc -l

There are 3 parts to this:

1. ls -R templates will list out all of the files recursively list subdirectories encountered in the templates directory
2. grep html will make sure to only return those files with html
3. wc -l uses the word, line, character, and byte count to return the number of lines return from the previous command

In each case one command is piped to the next.

This resulted in 41 html files.

OK, I'm not going to want to manually review 41 files. Looks like we'll be going with option 2, "Try and write a bash command to do it for me"

In the end the bash script is actually relatively straight forward. We're just using grep two times. But it's the options on grep that change (as well as the regex used) that are what make the magic happen

The first thing I want to do is find all of the lines that have the string class= in them. Since there are html templates, that's a pretty sure fire way to find all of the places where the styles I am interested in are being applied

I use a package called djhtml to lint my templates, but just in case something got missed, I want to ignore case when doing my regex, i.e, class= should be found, but so should cLass= or Class=. In order to get that I need to have the i flag enabled.

Since the html files may be in the base directory templates or one of the subdirectories, I need to recursively search, so I include the r flag as well

This gets us

grep -ri "class=" templates/*

That command will output a whole lines like this:

templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:    <table class="table-fixed w-full border text-center">
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                <th class="w-1/2 flex justify-left-2 p-2">Task</th>
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                <th class="w-1/4 justify-center p-2">Edit</th>
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                <th class="w-1/4 justify-center p-2">Delete</th>
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                    <td class="flex justify-left-2 p-2">
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                    <td class="p-2 text-center">
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                        <a class="block hover:text-gray-600"
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                            <i class="fas fa-edit"></i>
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                    <td class="p-2 text-center">
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                        <a class="block hover:text-gray-600"
templates/tasks/steps_lists.html:                            <i class="fas fa-trash-alt"></i>
templates/tasks/step_form.html:        <section class="bg-gray-400 text-center py-2">
templates/tasks/step_form.html:            <button type="submit" class="bg-blue-500 hover:bg-blue-700 text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded">{{view.action|default:"Add"}} </button>

Great! We have the data we need, now we just want to clean it up.

Again, we'll use grep only this time we want to look for an honest to goodness regular expression. We're trying to identify everything in between the first open angle brackey (<) and the first closed angle bracket (>)

A bit of googling, searching stack overflow, and playing with the great site regex101.com gets you this

<[^\/].*?>

OK, we have the regular expression we need, but what options do we need to use in grep? In this case we actually have two options:

1. Use egrep (which allows for extended regular expressions)
2. Use grep -E to make grep behave like egrep

I chose to go with option 2, use grep -E. Next, we want to return ONLY the part of the line that matches the regex. For that, we can use the option o. Putting it all together we get

grep -Eo "<[^\/].*?>"

Now, we can pipe the results from our first command into our second command and we get this:

grep -ri "class=" templates/* | grep -Eo "<[^\/].*?>"

This will output to standard out, but next I really want to use a tool for aggregation and comparison. It was at this point that I decided the best next tool to use would be Excel. So I sent the output to a text file and then opened that text file in Excel to do the final review. To output the above to a text file called tailwind.txt we

grep -ri "class=" templates/* | grep -Eo "<[^\/].*?>" > tailwind.txt

With these results I was able to find several styling inconsistencies and then fix them up. In all it took me a few nights of working out the bash commands and then a few more nights to get the styling consistent. In the process I learned so much about grep and egrep. It was a good exercise to have gone through.

Posted by ryan on Tue 26 October 2021