Posting to the web from Drafts

• Philip Borenstein
• •
• 16 March 2023

• automation
• deployment
• drafts-app
• github-api
• webhooks
• yaml

Some notes on a mechanism for posting from Drafts with as little friction as possible.

• Write the text in Drafts
• Xocoyotl action
  • formats draft as a post with front matter
  • stores metadata used for updates & deletion
  • pushes post to repo
• Pushing to GitHub triggers a deploy on Netlify

The Xocoyotl Action

the genesis of this action came from Blogging from Drafts | roub dot net

• Assembles front matter for the draft.
• Most of the data can be inferred from the draft itself:
  • title (the first line of the draft)
  • date (the current date)
  • draftDate (date draft created)

  ---
  title: <the H1 from the draft>
  date: 2023-02-10T20:02:51.521Z
  draftDate: 2023-02-10T02:33:55.380Z
  draft: drafts://open?uuid=B79AE5C3-E1A5-4831-B4C3-AAE06AE73CF5
  github: https://github.com/tepiton/tlilli/blob/main/src/posts/b79ae5c3-e1a5-4831-b4c3-aae06ae73cf5.md
  newlines: false
  ---

• Data that can’t be derived from the draft is stored in Drafts/Library/Scripts/t-<credentialName>, keyed on the UUID of the draft
  • the repo name
  • the path for the file
  • whether to preserve newlines

  "B79AE5C3-E1A5-4831-B4C3-AAE06AE73CF5" : {
    "newlines" : false,
    "repoPath" : "src/posts",
    "repo" : "tlilli"
  }

Credentials

• GitHub credentials are stored in a Drafts Credentials object.
• The credentials object stores the GitHub user name (or project name) and a corresponding personal access token.
• The name of the credential is used in the name of the external storage.

• ← to the past
  A minimal repo
• to the future →
  working with jq and zq