It's no lie that I love terminals. I wish I could live on a terminal and never really need to see a GUI application again.

Last night I migrated a lot of my old code from one GitLab account to another (tyrelsouza to tyrel) in an effort to clean up some of my usernames spread across the world. While doing that I noticed my django-dbfilestorage Python module that has been sitting and rotting for three years. I played around a little bit in order to port it to Python 3.9, but I ran into some base64 errors. I tried a little bit but it was late and I couldn't figure it out. My resolve is that I have been away from Python for too long so the little things - that I knew and love - had fallen away. I mentioned this to my friend Alex and he said "make a barebones github cli (readonly?) with issue viewer, and stats display". I've embarked on a journey to refresh my Python well enough to repair DBFS.

I knew I wanted to use httpx as my network client library, it's new, fast, and I have a couple friends who work on it. I started with a barebones requirements.in file, tossed in invoke, pytest, and black. From there I used pip-compile to generate my requirements.txt - (a tip I picked up recently while adding Pip-Compile support to the Tidelift CLI) and I was good to go.

The docs for the GitHub API are pretty easy to read, so I knew all I really needed to do was set my Accept header to be Version3 and I could view the schema. With the schema saved to a .json file I then wrote a GHub class to pull this data down using httpx.client.Client.get, super simple! The only two endpoints I care about right now are the user and repos endpoints, so I made two get_ functions for each. After a little bit of work - which I won't bore you with the super intricate details - I have a functional cli.py file. For now, the only interaction is a propmt from rich for a username, and then you get a fancy table (also from rich) of the first page of results of repos, stargazer/watchers/forks counts, and a description.

Prompting for the username and showing my table of repositories.

It was a fun evening of learning what's changed in Python3 since I last touched it, especially as I've spent the majority of my career in Python2.7. Type annotations are super awesome. I'll probably pick it up again once I get some more free time later in the week. It's also nice blog fodder! I already have a million things I want to do next - pagination, caching, some more interaction.

Showing py.test running

I know the tool I'm writing is nothing special, especially with their own cli now, but I'm not looking at reinventing the wheel!

Check out the code so far on my GitLab (heh, ironic it's there).

Dependencies: httpx, pip-tools, black, invoke, pytest, pytest-httpx, rich.