pybites-carbon 0.1

A package to automate making beautiful code snippets using Carbon

Carbon Selenium

A small utility to generate beautiful code images using the awesome carbon service.

We added a walk-through of the tool and the code on our YouTube channel.

You can load in code from a file, the clipboard or a snippet:

$ carbon -h
usage: main.py [-h] (-f FILE | -c | -s SNIPPET) [-l LANGUAGE] [-b]

Create a carbon code image

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f FILE, --file FILE  File with code
  -c, --clipboard       Use code on clipboard
  -s SNIPPET, --snippet SNIPPET
                        Code snippet
  -l LANGUAGE, --language LANGUAGE
                        Programming language
  -b, --browser         Run Selenium in interactive (not headless) mode

Examples:

1. Make a hello world snippet carbon image:

   $ carbon -s 'print("hello world")'
   

   Resulting image:

   

2. Make a code image of a file, let's pick a FastAPI app I am working on:

   $ cat /Users/bbelderbos/code/infinite-scroll/main.py
   from fastapi import FastAPI, Query
   from sqlmodel import select, Session
   
   from youtube.models import YouTube, YouTubeRead
   from youtube.db import engine
   
   app = FastAPI()
   
   
   @app.get("/videos/", response_model=list[YouTubeRead])
   def read_videos(offset: int = 0, limit: int = Query(default=100, lte=100)):
   	with Session(engine) as session:
   		videos = session.exec(
   			select(YouTube).offset(offset).limit(limit)
   		).all()
   		return videos
   

   Run the script with the -f option:

   carbon -f /Users/bbelderbos/code/infinite-scroll/main.py
   

   Resulting image:

   

3. Copying the following lines to the clipboard:

   Here is my favorite feature: make an image from code I currently have on my OS clipboard (thanks pyperclip):

   Try it out, copy this code:

   from time import sleep
   
   sleep(2)
   

   Then run the script with -c:

   $ carbon -c
   

   Resulting image:

   

Setup

Make a virtual environment and install the requirements.txt file.

Download the ChromeDriver, and extract it in a folder, then set it's full path in .env, for example:

echo "CHROMEDRIVER_PATH=/Users/bbelderbos/bin/chromedriver" > .env

If you have a slow internet connection you can optionally internet connection you can optionally set SECONDS_SLEEP_BEFORE_DOWNLOAD to a value higher than the default 3:

echo "SECONDS_SLEEP_BEFORE_DOWNLOAD=10" >> .env

(>> means append (not override) to an existing file)

The script uses Selenium in headless mode. The resulting carbon.png image will be downloaded to your computer.

I only tested this on Mac so far. In the headless default mode it would download the image to the directory I ran the script in. Using interactive mode (-b switch) it would download it to my ~/Downloads folder.

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Enjoy and feel free to mention me or PyBites when you post one of the created images on Twitter. Also make sure you follow us to receive multiple Python tips every week (using these images).

Future plans / TODOs:

• Could build an API service around this ...

• Support passing other font types and background colors so we can also use it for our weekly PyBites Career and Mindset tips.