Wallypub User Guide
Wallypub is a CLI companion tool for Wallabag that allows you to turn Wallabag articles into a dedicated epub.
This guide provides in-depth information about how to work with this tool.
Introduction
Supported systems and software intent.
Supported Systems
Linux is the primary target for this tool. The burden of ensuring this works on Windows & MacOS is too great. This CLI tool was built against Arch and Ubuntu distributions. If there are issues on other Linux distributions, please file an issue
Design Goals
-
Slow down news consumption by building a way to create contained digests that encourages people to actually read the articles in their read it later service.
-
Ensure that if you use this CLI tool, a person does not need to muck about in their file system if they do not want to.
-
Purposefully use flat files for configuration so that tools outside of Wallypub can be used.
Usage
Commands
The commands are present in alphabetical order and organized by the domain followed by the action. Most of the information
can be found through the use of the --help flag. This page provides information on nuances and edge cases that might
not have fit in the CLI descriptions themselves.
Usage: main.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
Options:
--help Show this message and exit.
Commands:
config-edit prompts user to update settings values
config-init walks the user through the first time configuration
config-secrets-edit prompts user to update secret values in keyring
config-secrets-show displays the sensitive variables from the keyring
config-show displays the settings to the console
digest-by-ids generate EPUB from comma-separated Wallabag IDs
digest-cover-create procedurally generate a cover image for your digest
digest-recent generate EPUB from recent Wallabag articles
donate prints link to Glass Hound Computing's donation page
entry-add add an entry to your Wallabag instance
system-fonts-show displays installed system fonts
config-edit
prompts user to update settings values
An in depth guide about the configuration can be found in the settings section.
config-init
walks the user through the first time configuration
The first time configuration assumes some defaults, opting to only setup the requirements to generate a digest. Additional settings can be adjusted through the config-edit command.
If the default font is not installed, wallypub will install that in your system fonts.
config-secrets-edit
prompts user to update secret values in keyring
More details about the secrets can be found in the secrets section.
config-secrets-show
displays the sensitive variables from the keyring
config-show
displays the settings to the console
digest-by-ids
generate EPUB from comma-separated Wallabag IDs
The IDs should correlate with Wallabag entries. When viewing from the web, the entry ID can be found in the URL In https://app.wallabag.it/view/32247628 the ID would be 32247628
digest-cover-create
procedurally generate a cover image for your digest
digest_cover_create exists mostly to have a means of independently test that image generation works on the machine. It is also useful for testing new fonts to see how they look on the page.
Wallypub will automatically generate a new cover if the configured filename in the cover_file setting matches the default name of "cover.jpg", this remains true even if you configure another directory as the location for the static files. Recommendation is to call the file something "custom_cover.ext" or "name_of_digest.ext".
digest-recent
generate EPUB from recent Wallabag articles
donate
prints link to Glass Hound Computing's donation page
buymeacoffee.com/glasshoundcomputing
entry-add
Usage: main.py entry-add [OPTIONS] URL
add an entry to your Wallabag instance
The `--tags` flag for `entry-add` needs to be wrapped in a string `""` to
get comma separation if you intend on using spaces
within your tags.
Options:
--tags TEXT comma separated string
--help Show this message and exit.
system-fonts-show
Usage: main.py system-fonts-show [OPTIONS]
displays installed system fonts
Options:
--scroll allows you to scroll through system fonts q to quit
--search TEXT fuzzy search for font names
--help Show this message and exit.
Setup
Installation, settings, and secrets
Installation
Supported installation methods.
If installing through the AUR or the binary, the first time run will take longer since these rely on PyApp to run.
Note: after installation, it is encouraged to run config-init for the first-time setup.
Arch
yay -S wallypub
Binary
- Download
curl -LO https://codeberg.org/fausty/wallypub/releases/download/1.0.1/wallypub_1.0.1
- Move to usr bin
sudo mv wallypub_1.0.1 /usr/local/bin/wallypub
- Make executable
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wallypub
- Run
wallypub --help
Python
https://pypi.org/project/wallypub/
pip install wallypub
Settings
Initial Configuration
Running config-init will take you through your first-time setup. During the initial configuration, Wallypub only asks for the bare minimum information to create a digest. This includes the
name of the digest, who you would like to attribute its authorship to, and your Wallabag API credentials.
If you do not have the default system font installed, Wallypub will prompt you for your sudo password to copy the default
font, FreeMono.ttf into the system fonts location /usr/share/fonts.
There are more settings, explained below, and these can be edited after the first time setup by running config-edit.
Digest Settings
digest_title: This is the title of the epub that will appear in the file name and on the cover, if you use
an image generated by Wallypub. The default title is Wallypub Presents.
back_matter: This generates the final page in your EPUB. The back matter page just credits Wallypub and provides a link to donate. This can be disabled by setting this value to False.
File locations for creating a digest
digest_directory_filepath: Location of files for creating the digest, defaults to ~/.local/share/Wallypub/static"
digest_cover_image: The image file that Wallypub looks for defaults to ~/.local/share/Wallypub/static/cover.jpg"
digest_output_path: Where Wallypub outputs a generated epub, defaults to ~/Documents
Wallabag settings
wallabag_url: The URL where your Wallabag is hosted, defaults to app.wallabag.it
wallabag_userame: The username for your Wallabag instance.
wallabag_password: Your Wallabag instance password. Stored in your machine's keyring.
wallabag_client_id: client_id for accessing API. Follow the client setup if you do not know what this is.
wallabag_client_secret: client_secret for accessing API. Follow the client setup if you do not know what this is. Stored in your machine's keyring.
Retrieval Settings
The Wallabag allows one to customize which files are retrieved by passing certain URL parameters.
Article Parameters
The default configuration for article parameters assumes that the bulk of the material desired for reading is the more recently added items to Wallabag.
Example:
archive = "0"
starred = "0"
sort = "created"
order = "desc"
page = "1"
perPage = "10"
tags = ""
since = ""
public = ""
detail = "full"
domain_name = ""
The canonical place to determine the behavior of the URL parameters is in the Wallabag docs
Additional Article Parameters
Wallypub automatically filters out 0 length articles. This means that the number of recent articles you intended to make a digest from is lower. To ensure that the proper number of articles are inlcuded in the epub, a check is made and then articles are fetched using different parameters. The default is configured to pull this article from the back of the queue. This choice can be amended in the settings, however; the default was decided as a method to add variety. It is likely that articles saved from week to week might relate to a particular big news event or a rabbit hole. This default configuration attempts to provide some variety to the digest.
Other Settings
max_read_time articles with a longer read time than this will be skipped. Defaults to 120 (minutes). 120 minutes is about
15000 words, depending on one's reading spead.
minimum_reading_time Only article with a read time greater than this number are included in the digest. Defaults to 0.
0 time articles are always filtered out because it normally indicates that Wallabag was not able to properly pull the text.
log_level
log_level is an int value that gets translated to something human-readable in the logging libraries.
The values are as follows: .
CRITICAL = 50
ERROR = 40
WARNING = 30
INFO = 20
DEBUG = 10
NOTSET = 0
Note that FATAL is not present. That is because exposing that value through configuration was more difficult and unnecessary. If you have never set log levels before, DEBUG will be noisier than INFO, INFO will be noisier than WARNING, and so on. If you want a quiet terminal, increase the log level; if you are troubleshooting, decrease it.
Fonts
The fonts available are the ones on your system. If you want the cover image to be different, change the font in the settings. You can open-source fonts at The League of Moveable Type and Open Source Foundry.
To see what fonts are available on your system, you can run the show-sysetm-fonts command from wallypub.
If you prefer to use system tools for font exploration, you can also use the fc-list command from your terminal.
Fonts are stored under system fonts at /usr/share/fonts this location was chosen because it appears to be consistent across many distributions of Linux.
Example Settings File
On your system your settings file can be found at ~/.config/Wallypub/settings.toml or
you can use the Wallypub config-show to see the current configuration.
[AdditionalArticleParameters]
archive = "0"
starred = "0"
sort = "asc"
order = ""
page = ""
perPage = ""
tags = ""
since = ""
public = ""
detail = ""
domain_name = ""
[ArticleParameters]
archive = "0"
starred = "0"
sort = "created"
order = "desc"
page = "1"
perPage = "10"
tags = ""
since = ""
public = ""
detail = "full"
domain_name = ""
[Base]
application_directory = "/home/$USER/.local/share/Wallypub"
log_level = 20
max_read_time = 120
minimum_read_time = 0
[Digest]
title = "Wallypub Presents"
filepath = "/home/$USER/.local/share/Wallypub/static"
author = "$AUTHOR"
output_path = "/home/$USER/Documents/Wallypub"
cover_file = "cover.jpg"
title_font = "FreeMono.ttf"
date_font = "FreeMono.ttf"
back_matter = True
[Wallabag]
client_id = "$CLIENT_ID"
username = "$USER"
url = "app.wallabag.it"
Secrets
In order to access your Wallabag instance, Wallypub relies on two secrets.
Your wallabag_password and your wallabag_client_secret.
Viewing & Editing
You are prompted to add your secrets when running the initial config-init, but you
can view the currently configured secrets by running config-secrets-show. Updating the secrets
happens through config-secrets-edit,
Storage
Wallypub stores your keys in your devices' keyring. You will note there are separate commands for showing the config and showing the secrets. This is partially to prevent printing your config for troubleshooting and accidentally exposing your sensitive values, but also because the secrets are not store in a plaintext settings file.
Troubleshooting
Wallypub generates a debug.log file which can be found in your ~/.local/share/Wallypub/ directory
If you want to see debug output in your terminal, set the log_level to 10 in your base settings.
Issues
There are two ways to get bugs addressed. Reach out to the jeremiah@micro.glasshoundcomputing.com account or follow the Bug Reports section of the CONTRIBUTING guidelines.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why the name?
Wallabag + Epub = Wallypub.
Doesn't Wallabag have some Ereader integration?
Yes! There are many. KOReader, for example, has great integration with Wallabag; however, I found that I wanted the news that makes it to my e-reader to be more curated and for the experience of reading articles to be more intentional.
How long will you support Wallypub?
I consider this to be a complete tool for the scope of the design, but it is very possible that users of this software have ideas that I want to implement or pull in through merge requests. While feature updates are possible, this project is being released in maintenance mode.