yawp

A command line (CLI) app for publishing social media posts.

In brief

yawp takes some text as an argument and publishes it to the social media accounts of your choice. No need to read the comments, just send your yawp and move on with your day. Current options are Twitter and Mastodon, it's possible more will be added in future (or not).

yawp is specifically designed to fit within a broader toolchain: in general terms it tries to follow "the Unix philosophy":

• can take input from stdin (e.g. redirected from a file or another process)
• outputs the message as plaintext to stdout (i.e. the output is the input)
• takes all configuration from environment (ENV) values to enable flexibility

Installation

Homebrew

brew tap hughrun/yawp && brew install yawp

From binary on MacOS or Linux

1. Download the relevant binary file from the latest release.
2. Rename it to yawp
3. Make the file executable: chmod +x yawp
4. Save it somewhere in your PATH, e.g. in /usr/local/bin/. Alternatively you can symlink it from wherever you want to save it, like this:

ln -s /my/awesome/directory/yawp /usr/local/bin/

From source

If you're using another platform or don't trust my binaries you can build your own from source:

1. git clone or download the repository as a zip.
2. cargo build --release
3. Save it somewhere in your PATH, e.g. in /usr/local/bin/. Alternatively you can symlink it from target/release, like this:

ln -s /Users/YOURNAME/YAWP_PATH/target/release/yawp /usr/local/bin/

Usage:

yawp [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <YAWP>

Flags:

-h, --help Prints help information
-m, --mastodon Send toot
-q, --quiet Suppress output (error messages will still be sent to stderr)
-t, --twitter Send tweet
-V, --version Prints version information

Options:

-e, --env <env> path to env file

Args:

<YAWP> Message (post) to send.

If using stdin you must provide a hyphen (-) as the argument. However if you do this and are not redirecting stdin from somewhere, yawp will hang your shell unless you supply EOF by pressing Ctrl + D. (See example 5 below).

Environment variables

yawp requires some environment variables in order to actually publish your message. You can set these in a number of ways depending on your operating system. yawp also allows you to call them in from a file. See example 6 for using a file or example 7 for setting environment values at the same time you call yawp.

An example environment variables file is provided at example.env.

The possible values are:

Mastodon

For Mastodon you need the base url of your instance (server), and an API access token.

• MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN - You can create a token at settings - applications in your Mastodon account. You require write:statuses permission.
• MASTODON_BASE_URL - This is the base URL of your server. e.g. https://mastodon.social

Twitter

For Twitter you need the four tokens provided when you create an app at https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps.

• TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY
• TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET
• TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN
• TWITTER_ACCESS_SECRET

Examples

1. Provide message on command line:

yawp 'Hello, World!' -t
# Output: Hello, World!
# Tweets: Hello, World!

2. Pipe in message:

echo 'Hello again, World!' | yawp - -m

# Output: Hello again, World!
# Toots: Hello again, World!

3. Read from file

# create a file
(echo Hello fronds; echo "     It's me"; echo ...a tree 🌳) > message.txt

# run yawp and direct file content into it
yawp - <message.txt

# this does the same thing:
cat message.txt | yawp -

# Output: 
#Hello fronds
#     It's me
#...a tree 🌳

4. Chain commands

You can redirect the output of yawp as well as the input:

cat message.txt | yawp - > output.txt

# the message.txt and output.txt files are now identical.

5. Read from user input

This is not really recommended, but you may find yourself facing a user input prompt if you use a hyphen without providing any redirected input. i.e. if you do this:

yawp - 
# machine awaits user further input from command line

Don't panic, you can provide the message text by typing it in at the command prompt. There is a catch, however, in that yawp will wait for further input until it reaches EOF (End of File). This will not happen when you press Enter but can usually be provided by pressing Ctrl + D:

yawp -t - 
# machine awaits user further input from command line
Awoo!
[Ctrl + D]
# Output: Awoo!
# Tweets: Awoo!

6. Provide environment variables from file

In some situtations (e.g. when using Docker Compose or a systemd unit file) you may have already set environment variables specific to those needed by yawp. If not, you can call them in from a file by providing the filepath using -e or --env:

yawp -t --env ~/yawp.env 'I love to tweet!'

7. Provide environment variables on command line

You could also set ENV settings manually when you call yawp:

MASTODON_BASE_URL=https://ausglam.space MASTODON_ACCESS_TOKEN=abcd1234 yawp '🎺 I am tooting!' -m