FFDL

Dec, 2018: A small project to get reacquainted with Python. It was also a little bit useful - even though my days of reading fanfictions are long long gone, I was recently going over my old notes and it seems a lot of the stories are gone from FF.net.

Fortunately fictionhunt is still around and has copy of many of those so I am using that here. Though it necessarily means that this tool is only limited to one fandom (HP) as that’s the only one fictionhunt archives. But there are other tools for FF.net, AO3 etc. in general.

Usage

python3 -m venv /tmp/ffdl_venv
source /tmp/ffdl_venv/bin/activate
pip install poetry

git clone https://github.com/natrys/ffdl/ /tmp/ffdl/
cd /tmp/ffdl/

poetry install

python3 ./cli.py --help

New python things that I have learned

• Asynchronous I/O
  • aiohttp
• Dependency management tool
  • poetry
• Survey of CLI argument parsing libraries
  • plac is nice and minimal
  • click is elegant and capable, but a little complex
  • Fire looks fantastic

Features that I don’t need and might not get around to add

• [ ] A web front-end for API server
• [ ] Extract and add more metadata to output
• [ ] Cache top stories in backend