👋 hello

A little command-line tool which helps reduce manual work for content creators.

Why?

Social media is hard. On one side, you would like to keep all platforms updated and share your creations with the world. On the other hand, maintaining all of them takes away a substantial amount of time from actually creating content.

You might say that this is not an important problem to solve - and I agree to some extent. But having a side-project next to work is a tough thing to handle, and every little step that can be automated saves some time for more important things like... uhm... friends and family?

You might say that this is cheating - and you might be right. Submitting an article is a soulless work of honor that should be done manually as a sign of respect (yo) to your audience. But guess what: most of your audience doesn't care about your link on social media, it cares about your content.

You might say there are similar tools - and that's true. There's Buffer, which can do everything that this tool can, but better. Nevertheless, the goal is to build a free tool under a permissive license that is easy to hack on.

Therefore I created hello.

Installation

cargo install hello-rs

Usage

Create a .env file with your credentials. See .env_dist for an example.

After that, run hello -h to get started.

For example, to submit a link to Reddit, run

hello reddit subredditnamehere "Give up" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs"

Currently supported platforms

• Reddit
• Twitter
• HackerNews
• Slack
• Patreon (tough one, as the API does not support publishing yet)
• Meetup.com
• Discourse (tough one, as only admins can get an API key)
• Bring your own!

How to get your credentials

Reddit

Create an app at reddit.com/prefs/apps. After that, add your credentials to .env. Then you can run hello like so:

hello reddit yoursubredditname "I gave up" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs"

Twitter

Make an app for yourself at apps.twitter.com and add the credentials to the .env file. On first execution of hello, you will get an access token for your app via OAuth.

Then run the following command to send a tweet:

hello twitter "Hello! https://github.com/hello-rust/hello"

Follow the instructions on the screen to save that for all subsequent requests.

Slack

Create an app at https://api.slack.com/apps. The app name doesn't matter. Choose the workspace that you want to send messages to.

Click on "create". You will be redirected to the configuration page where you click on "permissions".

Look for "scopes" and select one of the following:

• chat:write:user if you want hello to send messages using your Slack username.
• chat:write:bot if you want hello to send messages using the app username.

At the top, you should see your OAuth token, which you have to store in the .env file of hello. If you don't see your token, you might have to click on "request approval" to be allowed to install the app into the selected workspace.

That's all you need. Save everything.

Run the following command to send a message to your-channel-name:

hello slack "your-channel-name" "Hello! https://github.com/hello-rust/hello"

HackerNews

Since HackerNews doesn't have an API for submitting links, we have to be creative. We use the awesome fantoccini to control a WebDriver compatible browser.

1. Install geckodriver by fetching the latest build from their release page.
2. Add your HN credentials to .env.

Example:

hello hn "Show HN: Hello, a CLI tool for managing social media" https://github.com/hello-rust/hello

Contributing

This tool was made possible by the excellent patrons of "Hello Rust!", a show about the Rust programming language. With their help, this tool is made available to the public under dual MIT/Apache license.

Become a patron now to support future work and send pull requests for supporting other platforms.