codegrab

codegrab

codegrab is a command-line tool that allows you to extract Python module or function code from local files or directly from a GitHub repository. It concatenates all files fetched to prepare for feeding into LLMs.

Features

• Retrieve an entire Python module locally or from a GitHub repository.
• Extract specific function definitions, including decorators.
• Supports specifying a GitHub repository and branch to fetch files remotely.
• Concats all results.

Why this is useful

By fetching code and concatting it into a string, you can feed it into tools like Simon Willison's command-line tool llm.

The following will take one function from the specified code base, compare it to another, and use OpenAI to give feedback on why one works and not the other by piping it into the llm command.

uv run codegrab module.location:function --repo [private repo] \
 | uv run codegrab other_module.location:function --repo [private repo] \
 | llm --system "The first function does not work, the second one does. The first one fails when I supply stats=['mean'] whereas the second one successfully includes stats. Can you see what the difference could be? Can you suggest changes to the first implementation so that it accepts stats in the same way the second one does?"

Fetching code as a string could also be used to load a prompt with lots of examples to show it how to write domain specific code and so on.

Installation

pip install codegrab

Alternatively, you can run it without installing using uv:

uvx codegrab

Usage

Extract a Local Python Module

To retrieve the full code of a module from your local file system:

codegrab module.submodule

Fetch from a GitHub Repository

If the --repo option is provided, CodeGrab fetches the file from a GitHub repository instead of the local system:

codegrab module.submodule --repo https://github.com/user/repo

By default, CodeGrab fetches from the repository's default branch. You can specify a different branch using the --branch option:

codegrab module.submodule --repo https://github.com/user/repo --branch dev

Example:

Download and concat the LLM module from Simon Willison's command-line llm tool.

codegrab llm --repo https://github.com/simonw/llm

Extract a Specific Function

To retrieve only the code for a specific function within a module:

codegrab module.submodule:function_name

Example:

codegrab llm.cli:prompt --repo https://github.com/simonw/llm

This will retreive the prompt method from the llm repository.

Note

codegrab doesn't support scoping the function being retreived to a class, it currently fethces the first function that matches the name in the file.

Environment Variables

To avoid GitHub rate limiting, you can set a personal access token:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=your_personal_token

Error Handling

• If the file or function is not found, an error message is displayed.
• If the GitHub request fails, an HTTP error code is shown.

License

MIT License

Contributions

Feel free to open issues and submit pull requests to improve codegrab!