Coding Train Contribution Porting Utility

This project was created to make the process of porting the contributions from the old Coding Train Website to the new one a bit easier for the contributors. This python script takes the old contribution metadata in markdown format as an input and creates individual json files containing the metadata of each individual contributions (following the new Gatsby format) that can now be copied into the showcase folder.

Warning: I am not a python programmer, there must be ways to do this better. In that case please let me know.

How To Use

First clone this repo locally in your computer.

Open the video metadata file from the old website archive. These files could be found in the repo inside folders like _CodingChallnges or _GuestTutorials and so on, with an underscore at the beginning. Open the correct metadata file and copy only the contributions part to a txt file inside the directory of this script. For example:

  - title: "Asteroid Field"
    author:
      name: "Bossy Smaxx"
      url: https://asteroidfield.glitch.me
    url: https://glitch.com/~asteroidfield
  - title: "Swifty Starfield"
    author:
      name: "Bob Voorneveld"
      url: "https://www.bobvoorneveld.nl"
    url: "https://github.com/bobvoorneveld/Coding-Challenges/tree/master/CC001-Starfield"
  - title: "Hyperdrive Engaged"
    author:
      name: "JurriaanD"
      url: "http://projects.jurriaan.be/starfield/"
    url: "https://github.com/JurriaanD/Starfield"
  - title: "ES6 Starfield"
    author: "Bjorn Van Acker"
    url: https://bjorvack.github.io/code-challenges/challenges/cc-001-starfield/
    source: https://github.com/bjorvack/code-challenges/tree/master/challenges/cc-001-starfield

Remember to be careful about not skipping any spaces in the beginning. This file should be the exact copy of the contributions metadata.

Now run the command:

python3 main.py your_input_file.txt

You can also choose not to mention the input filename in the command line argument. In that case, simply name the text file contrib.txt and it will use it as the input by default. The command would be, simply:

python3 main.py

Now you should see the json files appear in the output folder. Check them to be sure that the script worked correctly. Now you can copy the contents of the output folder to your showcase directory. Please note that the .gitkeep file is not to be copied into the showcase directory.

To reuse this script again, make sure to clean the directory:

sudo rm -f output/*.json *.txt

If you are not using bash or another UNIX command line, you can also just manually delete the JSON and the input files, and you are good to go.

Comments

• Make sure to always check the outout files before using them.
• The script converts the video_id property to a valid url property.
• The source property isn't used as discussed here.
• There is absolutely no exception handling, I'm sorry!
• I would like to implement a way fetch the metadata directly from the website archive, but I feel like that would be a bit of an overkill
• This whole project was written entirely in a train, which is very appropriate, I feel.