Hacker News + Steampipe

Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. Steampipe marshalls the HN API data into queryable tables letting you interactivly explore it via our command line interface or your favorite SQL client.

Steampipe is an open source CLI to instantly query cloud APIs using SQL.

Example query:

select
  score,
  descendants as comments,
  title
from
  hackernews_top
where
  type = 'story'
  and lower(title) like '%sql%'
order by
  score desc;

standard output (can use .output to change to csv or json):

+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| score | comments | title                                                               |
+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 242   | 300      | Query Hacker News API with SQL                                      |
| 121   | 127      | Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL (2016)         |
| 70    | 12       | Show HN: QueryCal – calculate metrics from your calendars using SQL |
| 17    | 10       | Global Associative Arrays in PostgreSQL                             |
+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------------------+

Documentation

• Table definitions & examples →

Get started

Install

Download and install the latest Hacker News plugin:

steampipe plugin install hackernews

Credentials

The Hacker News API is open to the public and does not require any credentials.

Configuration

Connection configurations are defined using HCL in one or more Steampipe config files. Steampipe will load ALL configuration files from ~/.steampipe/config that have a .spc extension. A config file may contain multiple connections.

Installing the latest hackernews plugin will create a default connection named hackernews in the ~/.steampipe/config/hackernews.spc file. You may edit this connection to set options:

connection "hackernews" {
  plugin    = "hackernews"
  max_items = 5000
}

Get involved

• Open source: https://github.com/turbot/steampipe-plugin-hackernews
• Community: Slack Channel