A new article on DEV with Python

DEV API

If you want to create a new article on DEV, you can do it using the DEV API, running the following command from the terminal:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "api-key: API_KEY" \
  -d '{"article":{"title":"Title","body_markdown":"Body","published":false,"tags":["discuss", "javascript"]}}' \
  https://dev.to/api/articles

Replacing the following values in the article JSON object:

• title: Title of your new article
• body_markdown: Content of your article, markdown formatted.
• published: It can be true or false, when false the article is saved as draft.
• tags: Any tag from dev.to/tags.

You also must replace the value of api-key with your own key that you can get from the DEV Community API Keys section at dev.to/settings/accounts.

Optimize the process with Python

Wrote a blog post some months ago on how to Automate your posting process on DEV with Python, Bash and GitLab CI where I explained how to automate the whole process using those technologies.

This week, I updated the GitLab project and deleted the Bash script to use Python instead.

The directory structure of the project is as follows:

• articles: A directory where Markdown files with the content of the articles are stored
• articles/articles.yml: Configuration file with details of the articles, including title, body and tags.
• publish.py: Python script that makes sure your article is published on DEV.
• tweet.py: Python script that shares your article on Twitter.

articles.yml

Create a directory named articles and a YAML file, inside that directory, named articles.yml. This file will contain the following information and must be updated whenever a new article will be published:

recent_articles:
  - title: "Title"
    body: "articles/article.md"
    tags: "tag1 tag2"

Every new article is formatted using Markdown and that content is captured in a .md file.

publish.py

The Python script will get the details of the article from the articles/articles.yml file, read the Markdown file and pass the content to the article JSON object and make the POST request to the DEV API for publishing the new article.

The following Python libraries are required:

• yaml
• requests

They can be installed using pip:

pip install PyYAML requests

After that, must be imported into the Python script:

import yaml
import json
import requests

The content of the .md file is read and assigned to a variable that will be passed to the json_escape() function as some characters must be escaped before assigning that value to the body_markdown variable in the JSON object.

dumps() method from the json library is used for escaping characters in the Markdown file.

def json_escape(md):
    markdown=json.dumps(md)
    return markdown

The API key you got from the settings of your DEV account is assigned to the dev_api_key variable.

dev_api_key = API-KEY

articles/articles.yml is opened for reading the content and get the details of the article, including title, body and tags, those values are stored in a dictionary.

with open('articles/articles.yml') as f:
    dict = yaml.safe_load(f)

And assigned to the title, body and t variables.

title = dict['recent_articles'][0]['title']
body = dict['recent_articles'][0]['body']
t = dict['recent_articles'][0]['tags'].split()

t is a list that contains the tags of your article, extracted from the string in the dictionary using the split() method.

f = open(body, 'r')
md = f.read()
markdown = json_escape(md)

body variable contains the name of the Markdown file that is read and the content passed to the json_escape() method.

Tags in the t list are concatenated to get a string similar to ["tag1", "tag2"] that is assigned to the tags array in the JSON object.

tags="["
for i in t:
    tags+= '"' + i + '"'
    if i != t[-1]:
        tags+=","
tags+="]"

Now, the requests library will be used instead of the curl command for making the POST request to the DEV API.

The value of URL and headers are set in variables.

url = 'https://dev.to/api/articles'

headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json', 'api-key': dev_api_key}

A json variable, with the JSON object and corresponding values, is declared.

json='{"article":{"title":"' + title + '","body_markdown":' + markdown + ',"published":true,"tags":' + tags + '}}'

Now, the POST request is made.

r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json)

Your first article

Write the content of your article in a Markdown file and save it with the .md extension.

Modify the articles/articles.yml file and write the details of your article.

Run the Python script from the command line.

python publish.py

Your article is published now.