Paper to Git

This project aims to sync documents between Dropbox Paper and any local Git repository. Why? Because apart from all other features that Paper has, it is an excellent in-browser markdown editor.

This is an effort to create and automate Paper->Github Pages workflow, where I can create and publish my blog posts by writing them in dropbox paper and automatically fetching it from there and publishing it in Github Pages.

Current State: This project is currently in its very initial stages and nothing is guaranteed to work. I will update this as the project moves forward.

Install

To install, try out the following commands:

$ pip install papergit

Usage

Web Interface

Paper-to-Git comes with a neat little Web Frontend written in Flask. You can run that by using:

$ paper-git serve

If this is your first time, you will have to authorize usage of your dropbox account. See more on that below.

Commandline

You can run paper-git --help in the console to print out the help text.

The first time you use paper-git, it will create a var directory in the current working directory. This directory will hold the important files and database related to paper-git.

On the first run of any commnad, like paper-git list will run the authorization workflow for you to allow paper-git access to your Dropbox account. Not that even if you allow, I cannot access anything in your account as the authorization token is stored locally only on your machine.

The flow looks something like this:

$ paper-git list
1. Go to: https://www.dropbox.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=<client_id>&response_type=code
2. Click "Allow" (you might have to log in first).
3. Copy the authorization code.
Enter the authorization code here: <authorization code>

This will store your authorization token in the user configuration file at var/etc/paper-git.cfg.

If you want this configuration to persist from anywhere, just copy var/etc/paper-git.cfg to /etc/paper-git.cfg.

After this, you can run update command to pull the list of all the docs:

$ paper-git update

Note that update command doesn't pull changes in the already exsting docs in the database. To update an existing document in the database try:

$ paper-git update <doc-id>

You can list all the docs in the database using:

$ paper-git list --docs

or you can list all the folders using:

$ paper-git list --folder

You can also add a Sync object to a tie together a path in a git repo to a Paper Folder so that they can be synchronized automatically.

$ paper-git add --repo <path/to/git/repo/root/> --path <path/in/git/repo> --folder <paper-folder-name>

Note that the <paper-folder-name> in the above command is case-insensitive. Once you replace all the variables and the above command runs successfully, you have added a new rule to sync the documents.

After you have add a new rule, now you can publish your documents to their respective. publish command will copy the downloaded files to their new destination along with some added metadata that most common static site generators expect.

While the addition of metadata can be turned off if needed, it is turned on by defualt for now.

$ paper-git publish <doc-id>

Note that this will only work for changes that have already been pulled down using the update command.

You can play paper-git using an interactive shell by using the shell command:

$ paper-git shell

This will a start an interactive ipython shell with an initialized config object.

In [1]: config
Out[1]: <paper_to_git.config.config.BaseConfig at 0x7f2ca4cd6cc0>

In [2]: config.db
Out[2]: <paper_to_git.database.BaseDatabase at 0x7f2ca4cd64a8>

You can play with the models and interact with the database:

In [3]: from paper_to_git.models import PaperDoc

In [4]: for doc in PaperDoc.select():
   ...:     print(doc)
   ...:
1: Document <1>
2: Document <2>
3: Document <3>

You can also force sync of a Doc, which you have changed:

In [5]: doc = PaperDoc.get_by_paper_id('<paper_doc_id>')

In [6]: doc.get_changes()
Update revision for doc <Doc> from 54 to 69

License:

This project is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Please see the LICENSE file for a complete copy of license.