---
title: "Rewrite Hugo Themes Report in Python"
date: 2019-01-25T01:02:57-08:00
draft: false
tags: ["python","sql","sqlalchemy","html5","hugo-themes"]
authors: ["trent"]
post: 6
---
date: 2019-01-25T01:02:57-08:00

## **Ranking Hugo Themes by Stars, Commit Date**
A while back I was grazing the selfhosted subreddit, and noticed Hugo coming up in conversation.
I recalled that hugo requires a third-party theme in order to function. But was a bit of a challenge,
because how do you know what is a good Hugo theme?

## **First Version in Bash**
I ended up writing a little bash script (now deprecated) that scrapes the Github api and generates a little report about Hugo themes.
It basically curled json from the Github api, and parsed it with grep, awk, and sed, and eventually spat out a plain text file.

## **Rewrite in Python**
It was about a year later that I decided to rewrite the script in Python, using sqlite as a database.
I discovered how to use the python requests module, got some practice with sqlite,
and discovered how to make conditional request against the Github api using ETags and ‘If-Modified-Since’ (ETags are easier).

But this was my first time using python like this. And I have to tell you,
**it’s a lot moar fun than recursive fibonacci tutorials!**

## **Building an HTML5 Table (bootstrap, actually)**
By the time I had figured out how to collect the data I needed, I realized that I could simply generate an html table right in the python script.

`rank_hugo_themes.py` runs in a cronjob every night, and you can view
[Hugo Themes Report](https://trentsonlinedocs.xyz/hugo-themes-report/hugo-themes-report.html){target=_blank} here.

And you can [see the script on Github](https://github.com/TrentSPalmer/hugo_themes_report){target=_blank}.