My Music Postgres 🎵 💿

Bash interface to a local Postgres Database for music management.

Check out the C.S Weekly Article to learn about this project along with a guided explanation.

About

As a DJ, I felt there was a need to create a local database to manage my music. I'm used to spinning up and interacting with databases using ORMs and GUI clients. But in the spirit of C.S. Weekly (read about it here), I decided to do everything solely from command line with bash scripts and the psql client.

I Quickly found these pros:

• It was a quick refresher on using raw sqls commands
• It's fast
• I didn't need to wait to get a UI spun up or start pgadmin every time I want to interact with my db. Instead I was able to start using the tool immediately.

And these cons:

• It's harder to debug
• I have my db info hardcoded
• Creating the db uses an sql script with a referenced path. Therefore one has to make sure they're in the correct directory when running this command.
• The same issue as the above would exist if I persisted configuration information in a file with a relative path, which was starting to get out of scope for a tiny project.

Overall, I already feel the usefulness of this little tool and will continue to use it.

Feel free to download the project and setup a database to make use of the tool as well.

Installation

WARNING This program was developed on a Windows 10 machine and was not tested elsewhere. There are likely obvious bugs if porting the software as-is to other platforms.

If you wish to use this program, make sure you have postgresql installed in your system and in your path. You can always test if this is the case by simply running one of the binaries included with the installation:

createdb --version

Creating

If using this tool for the first time, you can simply run my-music --create. However, make sure you are in the same directory as the script. This step is not necessary, though, as you can create a database using any other mechanism such as createdb or using pgadmin.

Be sure to call your database MyMusic OR change the dbname variable in the script if you use a different name. Likewise the default user and password are both postgres.

Setting an Alias

Other than creating the db, the script can be run from anywhere. You can add the script to a /local/bin folder (and make sure it's in your path). I simply just referenced the repository directory on my computer from ~/.bashrc:

alias my-music="<PATH TO DIRECTORY>/my-music"

How To Use

my-music [[-c dbname user] | [-d dbname user] | [-h] | [-i]]

-c, --create  Creates database
-d, --delete  Deletes database. Cannot be undone.
  dbname [default=MyMusic]  Name of database to create or delete.
  user [default=postgres] Name of database owner and user.

-h, --help  Displays command line options
-i, --interactive Interactively add items, list and update items.

Changing Default Database, User, Password

SECURITY WARNING: The database name, user and password are all hard-coded in the script for simplicity. It is assumed that this is to be run on personal machines only.

The defaults are set to:

• database name = MyMusic
• user = postgres
• password = postgres

Simply change the values in the file my-music if you use a different setup.

########## VARIABLES ##########

## Database info
user=postgres     # change to your username
password=postgres # change to your password
dbname=MyMusic    # change to your database name

Contributions

Feel free to open a PR with bugs or patches to more easily port this script to other platforms.