How to export github issue automatically?

Github issue is suitable to write technical blog, at least I think so. To backup the valuable issues automatically is first and foremost. To make things simple, in this article, only export the issues of a repository without their comments.

export issues

According to the List repository issues api, use the command as below manually:

curl \
  -H "Authorization: token your-token" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/your-username/your-repo/issues

If the correct result is returned, then we can go to next step. We can use launchd or cron to do some automatic jobs on macOS. Because cron has no output or error message, so I choose launchd. Before writing the launchd configuration file, we need to write the shell script which does the exporting and transformation work first.

Prepare the shell script

• First, we need to save the output of above api to a file which I named output.json as the output format is json.
• Then, we need to transform the data from json to csv to make the data more readable. Here, I found a good package called json2csv

The final shell script as below:

curl -s $repo --header "Authorization: token "$token >$jsonPathName
$nodeBin $json2csvBin -i $jsonPathName -f $fields -o $csvPathName
echo $msg$(date +" %d-%m-%Y-%H:%M:%S")

The shell variable and its meaning as below table:

variable	meaning
repo	your repo name
token	your github api token used to do this exporting work
jsonPathName	the file to receive the output of exporting
nodeBin	node executable file
json2csvBin	json2csv script file
fields	preferred output fields
csvPathName	the transformed csv file
msg	the message when all the works done

Run the shell script manually, you will see the csv file in the specified location and the successful message in the terminal.

Configure the automatic part

Here is an example as below, the parameters meaning can be found here.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>test.ssaw.issue-export</string>
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/Users/your-username/issue-export2csv.sh</string>
    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/test.ssaw.issue-export.err</string>
    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/test.ssaw.issue-export.out</string>
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Hour</key>
      <integer>17</integer>
      <key>Minute</key>
      <integer>29</integer>
    </dict>
  </dict>
</plist>

Save the plist file in the ~/Library/LaunchAgents/.

Using launchctl to load the timed job

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/test.ssaw.issue-export.plist

Enjoy the happiness of technology!