Why we script

I tell my students "the cool thing about what we do is that if we're not happy with the way something works, we've got a shot at fixing it."

That came up this morning so I thought I'd share.

I recently posted about the in-term projects my Software Development kids were working on. Well, now it's time to grade their final projects.

The code is up on GitHub. This morning I was faced with independently going to every project page and cloning each one:

Not fun!!!!

There had to be a better way. Fortunately all the projects were under a single "organization" and a little digging into the GitHub API reminded me that I could use this url:

https://api.github.com/orgs/stuycs-ml7-projects/repos 

which brought up all this nice JSON data.

A little poking around in the data finds that each project url is part of a line that starts with "ssh_url."

a little wget, sed, grep and sh magic later:

urls=`wget --quiet -O - https://api.github.com/orgs/stuycs-ml7-projects/repos | grep ssh_url | sed "s/.*\(git.*\.git\).*/\1/g"`

for url in $urls 
do
  git clone git@$url
done

Now, as long as all the projects are under a single Github organization I can easily clone or pull them without having to navigate the Github web site.

Commandline FTW!!!!!!