hn-news 0.1.0

Hacker News CLI client

hn-news — Hacker News CLI client

Technical summary

hn-news is a small CLI and library that scrapes the Hacker News front page and prints the top headlines in a tidy, Rich-formatted list. It focuses on reliability and clear error handling (uses httpx, beautifulsoup4, and rich). The command-line entry point is provided as hn-news and the programmatic API exposes HeadlineFetcher for direct use in other Python code.

Key behaviors

• Fetches and parses the Hacker News front page at https://news.ycombinator.com.
• Returns headlines as a list of (title, url) tuples. Relative links like item?id=... are normalized to absolute URLs.
• CLI options: configure number of headlines (-n / --number) and enable debug logging (--debug).
• Uses structured logging via rich.logging.RichHandler and prints errors to the console on failure.

Requirements

• Python: >=3.12 (declared in pyproject.toml).
• Python packages: httpx, beautifulsoup4, rich (these are declared as project dependencies).

Installation

Install from source (recommended for development):

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install .

Or install from a built wheel (after running a build):

python -m pip install dist/hn-news-<version>-py3-none-any.whl

Usage — CLI

Show top 5 headlines (default):

hn-news

Show 10 headlines:

hn-news -n 10

Enable debug logging to see HTTP/parse debug messages:

hn-news --debug

License

MIT