Posted on Apr 4, 2024 • Edited on Apr 17

How to Download All Your Published Articles from DEV.to in Markdown Format

Introduction

As a content creator on DEV.to, you may want to have a local backup of all your published articles in Markdown format. This can be useful for various reasons such as offline access, archiving, or editing outside the platform.

In this guide, we'll walk through how to download all your published articles from DEV.to using the DEV API and save them locally as Markdown files.

Prerequisites:

Before proceeding, you will need:

Access to your DEV.to account
An API key from DEV.to to authorize API requests

Step 1: Obtain Your API Key

Log in to your DEV.to account.
Go to your account settings.
Navigate to the Account Settings tab.
Scroll down to find the DEV API Key section.
Generate a new API key if you don't have one, and make sure to keep it secure.

Step 2: Setting Up the Script

We'll use Python and the requests library to interact with the DEV API and save the articles.

import requests def get_posts_response_data(api_key): # URL of the API endpoint  url = "https://dev.to/api/articles/me/published" # Headers for the request  headers = { "Content-Type": "application/json", "api-key": api_key } # Send GET request  response = requests.get(url, headers=headers) # Check if request was successful  if response.status_code == 200: # Parse JSON response  response_data = response.json() return response_data else: # If request was unsuccessful, print error message  print("Error:", response.text) def save_dev_post_to_markdown(response,markdown_file_root_path): for article in response: markdown_content = article['body_markdown'] title = article['title'] if '/' in title: title = title.replace('/', '-') with open('{}/{}.md'.format(markdown_file_root_path,title), 'w') as f: f.write(markdown_content) print("File saved as {}.md".format(title)) # run the function response = get_posts_response_data(api_key) save_dev_post_to_markdown(response, markdown_file_root_path=r'/Users/luca/Desktop/Writing/DEV_MARKDOWN')

Step 3: Run the Script

Replace 'YOUR_API_KEY_HERE' with your actual DEV API key in the script.
Run the script in your Python environment.
Sit back and relax while your published articles are downloaded and saved as Markdown files locally.

Try save one article

Here's a snippet you can download just one article locally, replace api_key with your actual DEV API key in the script.

import requests # URL of the API endpoint url = "https://dev.to/api/articles/me/published" # Headers for the request headers = { "Content-Type": "application/json", "api-key": api_key } # Send GET request response = requests.get(url, headers=headers) response_data = response.json() # save the first article to markdown file markdown_content = response_data[0]['body_markdown'] with open('example.md', 'w') as f: f.write(markdown_content)

Conclusion

By following the steps outlined in this guide, you now have a local copy of all your published DEV.to articles in Markdown format. This can be a handy backup and provide you with more flexibility in managing your content.

Feel free to customize the script further to suit your needs or automate the download process. Happy writing!