pylect is a CLI program that searches the Sunday, Holy Day, and Commemoration Lectionary in the Book of Common Prayer 2019 for any upcoming holy days within a given date range and returns their corresponding Scripture lessons. When desired, it can then fetch the text of the Scripture lessons and automatically copy them to the system clipboard.
This is my first personal project! So, the purpose is to try my hand at making something from start to finish with nothing but my own inspiration to guide me. Practically speaking, the impetus for this project is the many hours I've spent creating bulletins and Scripture inserts for my local church. Calculating the correct day in the liturgical calendar, looking up the appropriate Scripture references in the lectionary, and then copying, pasting, and formatting the texts from different PDFs and websites has always been laborious and error-prone. This is my attempt to automate some of the boring stuff in my own life, and hopefully you find it useful too!
pylect is a program written in Python 3. If you don't already have Python installed, head over to the official Python website and download the latest version.
To start, simply clone this repository to your local computer with git clone https://github.com/wtwingate/pylect. Next, you will need to get your own ESV API key from here if you want to be able to automatically fetch and copy the Scripture texts into your clipboard. Once you have the key, create a .env file in the root pylect directory and add your key like so:
ESV_API_KEY=<your key goes here>
Next, to install the package globally, run pip install . while in the root of the cloned repository. This will install all the dependencies and allow you to call the program directly from the command line with pylect.
If you'd rather install pylect using a virtual environment, first run python3 -m venv .venv in the root directory of the project. After that, you can start the virtual environment by running source .venv/bin/activate and install the package with pip install . When installed this way, you will need to activate the virtual environment every time you want to run the program. I'd recommend creating a small shell script like this to help automate the process:
#!/bin/sh
cd ~/<path>/pylect
source .venv/bin/activate
pylect
Run pylect from the command line with python3 -m pylect <start_date> <end_date> or (more simply) with pylect <start_date> <end_date>. The start and end dates are optional arguments and must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD. When not given any arguments, the program will take the current date as a starting point and return all the liturgical days in the coming week. The results will be printed to your screen. You can select any of the days by entering their corresponding number and pylect will fetch the text of the lessons for you and copy them to your system clipboard. When you're finished, simply enter q to quit the program.
With no optional arguments, pylect will return all liturgical days ocurring over the next 7 days:
pylect
With the start date argument only, pylect will return all liturgical days between June 8th and June 15th, 2024:
pylect 2024-06-08
With both the start and end date arguments, pylect will return all liturgical days between June 8th and November 1st, 2024:
pylect 2024-06-08 2024-11-1
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The Book of Common Prayer 2019 was produced by the Anglican Church of North America and is freely available for download at the official website.
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The JSON-ified text of the Psalms is pulled from the Daily Office API created by Benjamin Locher. Much thanks to him for doing the hard work of wrangling the PDF text of the New Coverdale Psalter into a usable format!