clj-blogger

A Clojure library for the Google Blogger REST API

About

This is a simple REST (HTTP) client for Google's Blogger service. This library was written against the following release of Blogger:

• https://developers.google.com/blogger/docs/3.0/reference/

Before Use

There are a few things to be aware of before deciding to use this library:

• Google Authentication
• Configuration
• Alpha Status

Google Authentication

Because this library utilizes protected Google resources, you will need to set up OAuth2 access with Google; note that this library only supports using service accounts (thus avoiding the need to introduce a web browser into the mix).

Once created, there will be an option to download your OAuth2 credential data in JSON format -- do so. Save this to a file (e.g., ~/.google/blog-publisher-oauth2-creds.json); you will use it when creating a client (see below). This file will look something like this:

{
  "type": "service_account",
  "project_id": "blog-id-you-created",
  "private_key_id": "123abc...",
  "private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- ... ",
  "client_email": "[email protected]",
  "client_id": "12345...",
  "auth_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth",
  "token_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token",
  "auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/certs",
  "client_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/robot/v1/metadata/x509/google-blog-updates%40blog-id-you-created.iam.gserviceaccount.com"
}

Configuration

Instead of remembering to enter your Google blog ID every time you want to publish content, you can create a JSON configuration file that contains an associative array with the key blog-id and associated value that is the blog ID of the blog with which you want to work.

Note that if you will be repeatedly operating on Blogger resources with the same user-id, page-id, or post-id, you may make those entries in the config file as well, and they will be used on all appropriate requests.

You can save this to a file like ~/.google/blog.json and use it when creating a client (see below). This file will look something like this:

{"blog-id": "12345"}

Alpha Status

This is a brand-new library. I'm using it to publish updates to several of my own blogs. As such, I've started with the API calls that I need the most. You mileage may vary. That being said, if there's something you'd like to see added, feel free to open a ticket or even submit a pull request :-)

Supported API Calls

Here are the API functions that have been implemented:

• get-blog
• get-pageviews
• get-posts

Supported Utility functions

Processing previously exported Blogger data with clojusc.blogger.xml.parser.export:

• print-entry-ids - display the ids for all exported data with the <entry> XML tag (posts, comments, layout, the blog itself, etc.)
• print-post-ids - display just the ids for the <entry> elements whose ids match the Blogger post id format
• get-post-ids - same as above, but returns a lazy sequence of post ids instead of printing them
• get-entry - given 1) XML data that has been processed by clojure.zip/xml-zip and 2) a Blogger <entry> id, get the entry and all it's child XML nodes; returns a parsed collection that may be used by any of the extract-* utility functions
• get-posts - given XML data that has been processed by clojure.zip/xml-zip, returns a lazy sequence of parsed XML entries of blog posts
• extract-xml-text, extract-attrs, extract-draft-bool, extract-author, extract-tags, extract-url, extract-post - given a parsed collection (e.g., as returned by get-entry) and potentially additional parameters, extract the desired data. In the cases of extract-author and extract-post, a hash-map is returned that represents the node's children; all others return just the data itself.
• extract-posts - given XML data that has been processed by clojure.zip/xml-zip, return a lazy sequence of blog post hash-map data

For example usage, see the unit tests in the clojusc.blogger.test.xml.parser.export namespace.

Unsupported API Calls

These are the ones remaining:

• get-blogs
• get-comment
• get-comments
• approve-comment
• delete-comment
• spam-comment (rename to hide-spam-comment?)
• remove-comment-content
• get-page
• get-pages
• add-page
• delete-page
• update-page
• get-post
• search
• add-post
• delete-post
• update-post
• publish-post
• unpublish-post
• get-user
• get-user-blog
• get-user-post
• get-user-posts

Layout

Note that the code layout for this project does not match the Blogger REST API URLs. However, since none of the function names collide, a flat namespace is provided for all API calls: clojusc.blogger.api. The implementations for the protocol defined there are provided in sensible library namespaces under clojusc.blogger.api.impl.*.

Client

This is essentially a very thin wrapper around clj-http: we don't do anything clever on top of it. Anything you'd normally pass to clj-http functions will work the same with clj-blogger (in most cases, this will be the third argument to the functions in this API).

Documentation

Versioned Clojure client documentation is available here:

• API Reference
• Marginalia

Usage

From the above notes (and a quick look at the source code), it should be fairly clear how to use the API. First, create a client:

(requre '[clojusc.blogger.api.core :as api])

(def c (api/create-client {:creds-file "blog-publisher-oauth2-creds.json"
                           :config-file "blog.json"}))

(api/get-blog c {:blog-id "12345"})

You can also pass options to clj-http:

(api/get-blog c {:blog-id "12345"} {:debug true})

Partial Responses

clj-blogger supports asking the API for just a subset of the response data. Simply pass the :fields option (per the API partial response spec) For instance, if you'd only like to see the titles of all posts:

(api/get-posts c {:fields ["items(title)"]})

License

Copyright © 2018-2019, Clojure-Aided Enrichment Center

Distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.