So I have always like the idea of being able to share simple snippets of code, but my first real foray into this was using PasteBin. The reason I was using PasteBin was because that is what the Minecraft mod, ComputerCraft, allowed you to download code off of the internet easily. I wrote a few programs that are still on my PasteBin. Since I found out that GitHub had a competitor in the form of GitHub’s Gists, I switched to that. I like the GitHub platform and its easy to switch between the gists and Git, and even clone the gists with git clone. I recently found HasteBin, an open source alternative to PasteBin that has a command-line tool. The command-line tool, called haste-client is extremely easy to use, only requiring you to pipe in the information you want to upload to HasteBin. You can even host your own HasteBin Server and point the haste-client to it. While I liked this, I also liked the ability to have other information about the code that I was sharing, along with being able to look at revisions like git, but haste-client is so easy to use, so I decided to create my own client for Gists.

GistBin⌗

GistBin is my alternative. This allows you to upload files to GitHub’s Gist platform from the command line by piping the text into the program. Here is an example:

octocat@octoserv:~$ cat hello_world.rb | gistbin
https://gist.github.com/octocat/6cad326836d38bd3a7ae

You can also pipe any text from the terminal into it, for example if you wanted to list all files in a directory, you could run this.

chandler@BlueServer:~$ ls -1 | gistbin -n "home_dir_example" -d "Example of listing your home directory"
https://gist.github.com/chand1012/c9cfe757c1577b347eae6f3dd130e134
chandler@BlueServer:~$

The -n/--name and the -d/--desc flags can be used to name the file and add a description to your gists, respectively. If these are omitted, like in the former example, a random name will be generated with the extension of .txt and the description will be left blank. You can also get the raw text URL of the gist with the -r flag.

chandler@BlueServer:~$ ls -1 | gistbin -n "home_dir_example" -d "Example of listing your home directory" -r
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/chand1012/c9cfe757c1577b347eae6f3dd130e134/raw/d8203f2b7026fb27bef0d08cff1765cc2cb2088d/home_dir_example
chandler@BlueServer:~$

This is useful for when you are copying and pasting the URL to be downloaded on another system.

While I think my tool is useful, and I hope others find it so too, there are a sacrifices I had to make to get it working, the biggest being that it does require that you have a GitHub user authenticated. You can log in with the following:

octocat@octoserv:~$ gistbin --login
Enter GitHub username: octocat
Enter GitHub access token: ****************
Keyfile saved.
octocat@octoserv:~$ 

On the plus side, Gistbin uses pip for installation, which can easily be installed on most Linux and Unix systems. To install, simply run pip3 install gistbin and you can then run it!

Currently I only know it works on Linux, but it should work on most Unix systems, OS X included. Windows is not supported at the current moment.

Hope you all find this useful!