Kinopio backup one-liner

I’ve been using Kinopio for all sorts of things, so it’s important to me I don’t lose any of my work.

Kinopio’s got an API which enables me to program this. I decided to write a shell script because I didn’t want to introduce any other languages to this (Python or JavaScript would have been my other choices), hoping to keep this accessible and not making folks deal with setting up their environment. I’m not sure how well I’ve achieved this, but I did end up using awk for the first time, so a small win there.

Here it is, allow me to explain:

KINOPIO_API_KEY=<your key> \
curl -H "Authorization: $KINOPIO_API_KEY" https://api.kinopio.club/user/spaces | \
jq -r ".[] | .id + \",\" + (.name | tojson)" | \
awk -v key="$KINOPIO_API_KEY" '{ print "curl -H \"Authorization: "key"\" https://api.kinopio.club/space/"$1" > "$2".json; sleep 1;" }' FS=, OFS=, | \
xargs -0 -n1 bash -c

• The first line sets the Kinopio API key as a temporary environment variable. Find the key by running JSON.parse(localStorage.user).apiKey in the console while logged in to Kinopio.
• The first curl command gets all of your spaces.
• The jq line processes and filters the spaces JSON into comma-delimited strings (one Kinopio space per line) with the space ID and name (YE-kaoG5T6Xetw2Jdiyfi,"[post] Joining Kinopio Club"). I kept the name in quotes so later I don’t have to escape it for spaces.
• I use awk to parse the <id>,<name> and construct the curl command for getting the space (which is the backup JSON). This redirects the output into a JSON file with the name of the space.
• Finally, xargs enables me to do this for each space.

It took me many hours to figure this out. I got stuck for a while when I had gotten the list of spaces and their ids, but I didn’t know how to take that output to create the final command. I was trying to manipulate stdin, then thought I should use variables instead. I don’t remember my search terms, but I eventually stumbled on using awk to write the new command, which is the insight I needed to finish the job.

I’ve got a private GitHub repo where I’ve added this as an Action, so now every hour, this runs and commits any changes to the repo.

Sometimes I’m getting a 401 from the Kinopio API, so I may have to tweak the timing. I wonder if I’m being throttled :)

Update at 11:03p: The 401’s were because I wasn’t expanding the API key environment variable in the awk command. I fixed that, which then led to getting throttled by the API. So then I added a one second sleep.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020