Initial commit

src/content/blog/gurl-cli.md

@@ -0,0 +1,80 @@
+---
+pubDatetime: 2024-03-24
+title: "gURL: A cURL Wrapper Written in Go"
+description: Moving on from frontend to something new.
+featured: true
+---
+
+Briefly: I am writing a CLI tool that fetches info from GitHub's REST API as a wrapper around cURL.
+
+Why?
+
+Just to keep my finger on the pulse of software development and to practice my programming skills because believe it or not, being able to code as a cybersecurity professional is extremely useful, even though it isn't _technically necessary_.
+
+I'm currently wading though documentation on Go modules and Go standard library packages, as well as reading other code examples to see how I want to structure my application.
+
+First, I found a [repo that](https://github.com/wick3dr0se/github-api-curl/tree/master) uses shell scripts to wrap around the GitHub API. This gave me the idea for splitting up my tool into different directories.
+
+Then, I fiddled around with [Google's GitHub Go library](https://github.com/google/go-github/tree/master) to see how they used Go to build the library.
+
+## Fits and Starts
+
+My first inkling was to crib this code from the Google repo:
+
+```go
+var defaultBaseURL = "https://github.com/"
+
+// Client is a GitHub scraping client.
+type Client struct {
+	*http.Client
+
+	// base URL for github.com pages.  Exposed primarily for testing.  Also
+	// used for saving and restoring cookies on the Client.
+	baseURL *url.URL
+}
+```
+
+I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking at; I have a `baseURL` variable that is assigned the GitHub url. I've imported the `net/http` package, as it would have been in this example. We have a `Client` type that is also a `struct` which I have forgetten what they are exactly, as it has been a while since I've read the C++ docs, which also has a `struct` but I think that `struct` in this instance has the `type` keyword to denote that it is a `class` or something.
+
+In any case, I was trying to figure out how to use string interpolation in the URL parameters like you would in JavaScript template strings:
+
+```js
+// Octokit.js
+// https://github.com/octokit/core.js#readme
+const octokit = new Octokit({
+  auth: "YOUR-TOKEN",
+});
+
+// the request method contains template strings which is
+// JavaScript's way of doing string interpolation
+
+await octokit.request("GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}", {
+  owner: "OWNER",
+  repo: "REPO",
+  headers: {
+    "X-GitHub-Api-Version": "2022-11-28",
+  },
+});
+```
+
+How does that work in Go?
+
+At first I was thinking of using `Stripln()` to do string interpolation but as a [StackOverflow user said](https://stackoverflow.com/a/71181938/3800146), to put that junk in a query parameter would be messy and unsafe. The user suggested the op use the `net/http` library which solves all the issues I'd face trying to make `GET` requests to GitHub's REST API.
+
+The example given:
+
+```go
+params := url.Values{
+    "page[size]":        []string{"100"},
+    "page[" + key + "]": []string{"1"},
+}
+u := &url.URL{
+    Scheme:   "https",
+    Host:     "url.com",
+    Path:     "/path",
+    RawQuery: params.Encode(),
+}
+req, err := http.NewRequest("GET", u.String(), nil)
+```
+
+This should do it for now.