Papertown

Papertown syncs you personal markdown blog with blog platforms like dev.to.

Best way to get an overview is to read this blog post: https://christiankohler.net/introducing-papertown

How does it work

Papertown sync only articles with a masterid in the frontmatter. The masterid helps papertown identify articles.

For every article it compares the content and then:

- if article doesn't exist -> create
- if article hasn't changed -> do nothing
- if article has changed -> update

Supported blog platforms

• DevTo

Quick Start

1. Make sure you have the correct folder structure

If the rootfolder is different change it in the config.

- blog-articles
  - article one
    - index.md
  - article two
    - index.md

2. Add a masterid to the articles you want to sync

Important: Posts without a masterid are ignored.

---
title: "Sample Blog Post"
masterid: 123
---

3. Add a canonical_url to link back to your personal blog

---
title: "Sample Blog Post"
masterid: 123
canonical_url: "url to this blog article"
---

4. Add a published field to create a draft

---
title: "Sample Blog Post"
masterid: 123
canonical_url: "url to this blog article"
published: false
---

5. Run Papertown with a valid api key

papertown sync --devtoApiKey apikey

Configuration

Config	Env	Args
Root Folder	ROOT_FOLDER	rootFolder
API Key DevTo	DEVTO_API_KEY	devtoApiKey
Github URL for images	IMAGE_ROOT_URL_GITHUB	imageRootUrlGithub
Dry Run	DRY_RUN	dryRun

1: Use args

papertown sync --devtoApiKey apikey

2: Use a .env file

DEVTO_API_KEY="yourdevtoapikey"

3: Set env variables before running papertown

DEVTO_API_KEY="yourdevtoapikey" papertown sync

Dry Run

Use dryRun to not create or update the post and only log what would happen.

Relative Images

Papertown can replace relative images with absolute github urls.

Requirements are:

• Github repo is public
• imageRootUrlGithub is set

Example

Run:

papertown sync
  --rootFolder content/posts
  --imageRootUrlGithub https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ChristianKohler/Homepage/master

and the url in the file (content/posts/first-post/index.html)

./images/hero.png

will be replace with:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ChristianKohler/Homepage/master/content/posts/first-post/images/hero.png

Dev.to

Add coverimage

Can be a relative image, papertown will resolve it.

cover_image: direct_url_to_image.jpg

Papertown API (BETA)

Papertown can be used within your node script.

Example

const { sync } = require("papertown");

const config = {
  rootFolder: "my-root-folder",
  devtoApiKey: "my-key",
  imageRootUrlGithub: "",
  dryRun: false,
};

await sync(config);