Dynalist Download

I have enjoyed using Dynalist off and on over the years. Having an online outliner that I can share documents with friends/family is important to the way I like to work. I seem to “think in outlines” so Dynalist really works well for my various lists, notes and reference materials.

The downside is that I am a bit fanatical about keeping a history of my notes, old versions, revisions, when things were changed, whatever. I want to be able to go back in time and see what changed when.

I’ve tried various formats of notetaking (org-mode, etc.) with a datetree type format, which keeps date history well, but doesn’t deal as well with projects/todo lists/etc. Having ToDo’s scattered around where they landed chronologically doesn’t work in my head when I’m planning a project.

So, I moved back to Dynalist again, but with one change - I would keep my history in a git repository.

Dynalist Pro provides a daily backup file, and I keep those also, but I wanted a more granular history, thus dynalist_download was born.

Features

• List all documents
• Check into git after download if output path is a git repository
• Download all files or single file
• Dump contents of documents in plain text, orgmode or markdown file formats
• Export contents of documents in json, either pretty printed or raw

Basic Usage

YOU MUST SET THE TOKEN CODE FROM DYNALIST AT THE START OF THE SCRIPT

Sometime I’ll make this an environment variable or something, but right now it’s hardcoded.

See https://dynalist.io/developer for information on getting your API key.

Make sure and keep your key confidential - this gives full access to your Dynalist files.

NOTE: gui option doesn’t work currently, if ever

usage: Dynalist_Download [-h] [--debug] [--gui] [--list] [--git] [--file FILE]
                         [--dump_all] [--format {plain,orgmode,markdown}]
                         [--json {pretty,raw}] [--output_path OUTPUT_PATH]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --debug               enable debugging output
  --gui                 enable gui
  --list                List all documents
  --git                 If output_path is a git repository, check in new data
                        after retrieval
  --file FILE           Download contents of file - can appear multiple times
  --dump_all            Dump contents of all documents
  --format {plain,orgmode,markdown}
                        output format - plain text, orgmode - can appear
                        multiple times
  --json {pretty,raw}   json output - pretty print
  --output_path OUTPUT_PATH
                        if directory given, output goes to that location
                        instead of stdout - EXISTING CONTENTS WILL BE DELETED

I have a crontab that runs hourly (that’s enough granularity for me now) that calls the script dynalist_archive_run.sh (in the bin directory in this repository) that downloads most everything and checks it into git.

For some time I was having issues with the push command to my remote git server - something not happy with ssh-keys that I haven’t gotten straight yet. Finally saw a reference online to just using a post-commit hook in git - that works like a champ so far.

To Do

Handle attachments - right now they are not downloaded

Initial setup

Install pipenv

• https://realpython.com/pipenv-guide/

sudo pip3 install pipenv

Set up virtual environment

pipenv --three shell
pipenv install requests

To run a command in the environment

pipenv shell
<command>

-or-

without launching a shell

pipenv run <command>

Need to uninstall pudb3 from final, shipping environment