gtasks

2012-02-03 · 🪦 retired

A command-line client (Ruby gem) for managing Google Tasks from the terminal. It can list, add, complete, and delete tasks, and clear all completed tasks at once; complete and delete accept a task number or, alternatively, a regular expression matched against task names for batch processing.

Google’s OAuth2 authentication is handled entirely within the command: on first run it starts a small local WEBrick server to receive the callback, then saves the obtained token to a file for reuse.

Internal design

The single file lib/gtasks.rb contains three layered classes: GoogleTaskAPI, which handles REST calls and authentication; GoogleTask, which wraps it in convenient methods; and GoogleTaskCLI, which formats output for the terminal.

• bin/gtasks — Subcommands are list / lists / add / clear / done / delete / choice (no arguments defaults to list). For done and delete, a numeric argument selects a task by its list number; anything else is interpreted as a regular expression, and all tasks whose names match are processed in one batch. The API client_id / client_secret are retrieved via the pit gem, so they never appear in the code
• GoogleTaskCLI — The presentation layer. It displays tasks numbered in the form [0] ☐ title, with completed tasks shown as ☑. choice picks one task at random from the list and displays it
• GoogleTask — The middle layer, providing number-based done / delete plus done_if / delete_if for batch processing by regular-expression match on titles. “Completing” a task is implemented by updating its status to completed
• GoogleTaskAPI — A thin wrapper around the Google Tasks API v1. It covers get/create/update/delete for both tasks and task lists, plus clearing all completed tasks, and makes HTTP calls through an access token from the oauth2 gem

Authentication works like this: on first run it prints the authorization URL for the user to open in a browser, receives the authorization code on a local WEBrick server (by default /oauth_callback on port 9999), exchanges it for a token, and saves it as YAML to ~/.google_tasks.yml. Since it requests access_type=offline it also receives a refresh token, so subsequent runs just load the file and refresh — no browser needed.

If the saved file has no refresh token it falls back to re-authentication, and if the initial authentication fails it deletes the token file so it can be recreated.

github.com/kimoto/gtasks