2y ago

lemmyverse: find communities from the command line

git.sr.ht

~otl/x: bin/lemmyverse - sourcehut git

lemmyverse: search lemmy communities from the command-line. Thanks to the data HTTP API from lemmyverse.net! This is not really as polished as I like but, hey, in the interest of having a lively Lemmy I thought I'd share anyway :)

Usage

lemmyverse searches community names and descriptions using a regular expression:

        lemmyverse pattern

Find communities about motorcycles:

        $ lemmyverse motorcycle
    120024@lemmy.world      All Things motorcycles
    20hirnzelle@feddit.ch   All Things motorcycles
    7810322@lemmy.world     All Things motorcycles
    bmwmotorrad@lemmy.world Community for BMW motorcycles. A place to share
    bootstrappable@slrpnk.net       A community to discuss all things BMW cars & motorcycles.\nFeel free to show off your new vehicle/parts
    buell@lemmy.world       A discussion area for Buell motorcycles.
    motorcycle_logistics@lemmy.world        A community for pictures and videos of people using motorcycles to transport things in a creative manner.\n\nThis includes
    motorcycles@feddit.de   This community is for all things motorcycle related. At a later point and with enough traction gained
    ...

Find communities for the Plan 9 operating system:

        $ lemmyverse '(plan9)|(Plan 9)'
    plan9@lemmy.sdf.org     Discussions on the Plan9 operating system.

Why?

I run relatively slow hardware and I'm travelling in Bali, Indonesia at the moment. Loading lemmyverse.net in a web browser takes ages and gets the laptop fans spinning (it's hot here!). So I had some fun creating a tiny command-line program to find Lemmy communities using classic UNIX tools awk(1), tr(1), grep(1) etc.

More info

See the man page:

        LEMMYVERSE(1)               General Commands Manual              LEMMYVERSE(1)

    NAME
         lemmyverse - find lemmy communities

    SYNOPSIS
         lemmyverse pattern

    DESCRIPTION
         lemmyverse finds Lemmy communities indexed by lemmyverse.net using the
         given regular expression as interpreted by grep(1).  Both the names and
         descriptions of the communities are searched.

         On first run, a local community database must be generated.  The full
         community index is downloaded from https://lemmyverse.net using curl(1),
         transformed, then stored in the user cache directory.  To regenerate the
         database, remove the file and run lemmyverse again.

    FILES
         communities
                 Community database from lemmyverse.net.

    ENVIRONMENT
         lemmyverse uses the following environment variables:

         XDG_CACHE_DIR
                 The directory to store the community database.  If unset,
                 $HOME/.cache/lemmyverse is used.

    EXAMPLES
         Find communities for the Plan 9 operating system:
               lemmyverse '(plan9)|(Plan 9)'

         List all communities from the instance lemmy.sdf.org:
               lemmyverse '@lemmy.sdf.org'

    EXIT STATUS
         The lemmyverse utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

    SEE ALSO
         grep(1), curl(1), https://lemmyverse.net