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Publishr — publish everywhere

For http://pragmaticperl.com I needed a tool to post the new issue announcement to several social networks. It ended up supporting Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, VK, Email, IRC, Jabber/XMPP, Skype and more.

Where to get it?

http://github.com/vti/publishr.

How to run

From the git repository:

perl -Ilib script/publishr --config publishr.json message.txt

Where message.txt looks like:

Status: This is the short title
Link: http://link-to-the-press-release
Image: /path/to/image.jpg
Tags: perl, pragmaticperl, journal

The
multiline
body

Of course every social network supports different kind of messages. This is handled by the so called channels. For example for Twitter publishr only uses Status, Link and Image.

The publishr.json configuration files looks like:

{
   "access" : [
      {
         "name" : "twitter access #1",
         "options" : {
            "access_token" : "",
            "access_token_secret" : "",
            "consumer_key" : "",
            "consumer_secret" : ""
         },
         "type" : "twitter"
      }
   ],
   "scenarios" : [
      {
         "access" : "twitter access #1",
         "name" : "post to pragmaticperl twitter",
         "options" : {}
      }
   ]
}

access is a list of channel credentials. You name them as you like, provide required options and use in scenarios. This is made so you can use the same access tokens for different scenarios, like posting to different Facebook groups etc.

In scenarios you can provide options with additional options, like an IRC channel etc.

Custom commands

Sometimes you will need to just run a custom cli program. For example this is how sending to Skype is done. In util directory you can find a skype-chat.py Python script which uses Skyp4Py library. In order to call that script you configure cmd scenario:

{
    "name":"skype",
    "access":"cmd",
    "options":{
        "env":{
            "PYTHONPATH":"/path/to/skype4py/"
        },
        "cmd":"./util/skype-chat.py 'Skype Chat' '%status% %link%'"
    }
}

Where %status% and %link% are replaced by values from the message.txt.

Running only specific scenarios or channels

Sometimes you would want to run just a specific scenario or a channel, there are options for this:

perl -Ilib script/publishr --config publishr.json \
    --scenario 'post to twitter' message.txt

perl -Ilib script/publishr --config publishr.json \
    --channel 'facebook' message.txt

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