DocumentCloud Command Line Interface

UPDATE: The old python-documentcloud has been deprecated, breaking the functionality of this project. I am working on using the current version of the library, but some functionality may not work.

A command line interface to the DocumentCloud service, written in Python.

I started this project because I needed a way to bulk upload a directory of documents where I had already uploaded some of the documents. I needed a more flexible client that let me use common Unix command line tools like find, ls, grep and xargs to provide input to the program. Similarly, I imagine the output of this program being piped to tools like csvkit or ndjson-cli.

This project serves a need for me when I need programatic interaction with the DocumentCloud API, but don't want to have to write the same boilerplate code, or bootstrap a coding project to upload some documents or extract a list of entities.

Supported functionality

I'm adding features as I need them for my work. Currently this utility supports the following:

• Uploading documents
• Retrieving project metadata
• Retriveving document metadata
• Retrieving document entities

Installation

Use pip:

pip install git+git://github.com/ghing/python-documentcloud-cli.git#egg=python-documentcloud-cli

Credentials

You can specify username and password with the --username and --password command-line arguments, or with the DOCUMENTCLOUD_USERNAME and DOCUMENTCLOUD_PASSWORD environment variables. The latter are preferred because then passwords won't accidently be stored in your shell history.

Examples

Load a list of URLs into a project

cat urls.txt | \
xargs -I % sh -c "documentcloud upload --project 'Test Project' %"

Display a list of document IDs for documents in a project

documentcloud projects get "Test Project" | ndjson-split d.projects[0].document_ids

Get CSV of all document details for documents in a project

documentcloud projects get "Test Project" | \
ndjson-split d.projects[0].document_ids | \
xargs -n 1 -I {} documentcloud documents get {} | \
in2csv -f ndjson

Get CSV of organization entities in a document

documentcloud documents entities 12345-test-slug | \
ndjson-split d.entities | \
ndjson-filter 'd.type == "organization"' | \
in2csv -f ndjson

Get CSV of all entities for all documents in a project

documentcloud projects get "Test Project" | \
ndjson-split d.projects[0].document_ids | \
xargs -I % documentcloud documents entities % | \
ndjson-split d.entities | \
in2csv -f ndjson

Prior art

• dcupload - A quick and dirty command line tool for bulk uploading documents to DocumentCloud.