Upload a file to a Gist with bash

Question

I usually paste error reports and logs on Gist at Github, to exchange programming relevant debug information. Gist doesn't have a button to upload a file. So sometimes it is not so convenient to copy and paste your large errorreports into gists textarea for input.

Is there a way to upload a file from the commandline into a new Gist in your Gist account?

also creating a temporary git repository for the file to upload would help, I would automate this in a script then.

In the end I would like to automate posting debug information of my programming project on github with one bash script

Answer 1

Here is a solution that works for me on Bash/Dash to create anonymous gist (very probably not bullet-proof):

# 0. Your file name
FNAME=some.file

# 1. Somehow sanitize the file content
#    Remove \r (from Windows end-of-lines),
#    Replace tabs by \t
#    Replace " by \"
#    Replace EOL by \n
CONTENT=$(sed -e 's/\r//' -e's/\t/\\t/g' -e 's/"/\\"/g' "${FNAME}" | awk '{ printf($0 "\\n") }')

# 2. Build the JSON request
read -r -d '' DESC <<EOF
{
  "description": "some description",
  "public": true,
  "files": {
    "${FNAME}": {
      "content": "${CONTENT}"
    }
  }
}
EOF

# 3. Use curl to send a POST request
curl -X POST -d "${DESC}" "https://api.github.com/gists"

If you need to create a gist associated with your github account, (for basic authentication) replace the last line by:

curl -u "${GITHUB_USERNAME}" -X POST -d "${DESC}" "https://api.github.com/gists"

For more advanced authentification schemes, please see https://developer.github.com/v3/#authentication