Using Wallabag as Newsboat Bookmarking Backend

Motivation

I'm using newsboat since some time and want to combine it with my self-hosted wallabag read-it later instance. Based on the idea from 0x61 and its honk-cli, I decided to give curl and a little shell script a try to clue both worlds together.

Newsboat

Newsboat supports setting of bookmarks by defining a dedicated application for handling. By setting:

bookmark-cmd ".newsboat/bookmark.sh"

The bookmark-cmd will provide an url as the first and only parameter to the given process. In that case, bookmark.sh.

The actual shell script

Because my wallabag instance requires a token-based authentication we need to get a token from the instance first. Consectuive API calls towards the REST-API are prefixed with that token.

For getting a token let's reate a $HOME/wallabag.cfg with the content. Within that file we define the required fields for getting an access token.

data-ascii = "grant_type=password&client_id=<client_id>&client_secret=<secret>&username=<username>&password=<pass>"

That information will be used by curl for getting the initial access_token like shown in the following script.

#!/bin/sh

[ $# -eq 0 ] && { echo "Usage: $0 url"; exit 1; }
[ ! -f "$HOME/wallabag.cfg" ] && { echo "$HOME/wallabag.cfg not found"; exit 1; } 

response=$(curl --config $HOME/wallabag.cfg -s \
               "https://www.wallabag.it/oauth/v2/token")
token=$(echo "${response}" | awk 'BEGIN{RS=","; FS=":"} /access_token/{print $2}')

# remove leading/trailing quotes
token="${token%\"}"
token="${token#\"}"

# set entries
curl -s -X POST -d "access_token=${token}&url=$1" \
       "https://www.wallabag.it/api/entries.json" >/dev/null

You can test the script as such by calling it via command line like:

./bookmark.sh https://example.org

References