Hacker News CLI

Install

Go

If you have go installed can just go get github.com/m1/hacker-news-cli and run hacker-news-cli

OR

Can clone and build it yourself, e.g. GO111MODULE=on go build

Make

Can run make and will use docker to build.

Usage

CLI

Three basic commands:

Get posts

hacker-news-cli Gets the latest 30 posts from hacker news, can add --posts <int> to determine how many posts are returned (max of 100), can also add --indent to pretty print the json or use something like jq. Example:

$ hacker-news-cli --posts 30 --indent

Returns (truncated)

[
  {
    "id": 18636113,
    "rank": 1,
    "author": "sbenitez",
    "comments": 20,
    "points": 104,
    "title": "Rocket v0.4: Typed URIs, Database Support, Revamped Queries, and More",
    "posted": 1544291822,
    "uri": "https://rocket.rs/v0.4/news/2018-12-08-version-0.4/"
  },
  ...
]

Save post

To save a post the command is just save <id> (this uses a sqlite db). Example:

$ hacker-news-cli save 18636113

View saved posts

To view the saved posts, use the saved command. As with getting the posts, you can also use the --indent flag here. Example:

$ hacker-news-cli saved --indent

Returns

[
  {
    "id": 18636113,
    "author": "sbenitez",
    "title": "Rocket v0.4: Typed URIs, Database Support, Revamped Queries, and More",
    "posted": 1544288444,
    "saved": 1544295644,
    "uri": "https://rocket.rs/v0.4/news/2018-12-08-version-0.4/"
  }
]

Library

Can also use this as a library, example usage:

package main

import (
	"github.com/m1/hacker-news-cli/pkg/hn"
	"github.com/m1/hacker-news-cli/pkg/hn/config"
)

func main() {
	client := hn.NewClient(&config.Config{
		MaxPosts: 100,
	})

	posts := client.GetPosts(10)
	for _, p := range posts {
		println(p.Id)
	}

	post, _ := client.GetPost(18636113)
	println(post.Id)
}

Notes

• Unit tested with ~70% coverage
• Used sqlite due to portable sql
• Uses colly for scraping, due to being nice and simple to use
• Uses gorm for db access
• Uses cobra for command line usability.