opendatastructures-cli

opendatastructures

Browse the Open Data Structures book by Pat Morin from the command line.

opendatastructures is a single pure-Go binary. It reads public data from opendatastructures.org over plain HTTPS, shapes it into clean records, and prints output that pipes into the rest of your tools. No API key, nothing to run alongside it.

The same package is also a resource-URI driver, so a host program like ant can address opendatastructures content as opendatastructures:// URIs.

Install

go install github.com/tamnd/opendatastructures-cli/cmd/opendatastructures@latest

Or grab a prebuilt binary from the releases, or run the container image:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/tamnd/opendatastructures:latest --help

Usage

# List all 14 chapters (Python edition, default)
opendatastructures chapters

# Java edition
opendatastructures chapters --lang java

# C++ edition
opendatastructures chapters --lang cpp

# Output formats
opendatastructures chapters -o json
opendatastructures chapters -o csv
opendatastructures chapters -o tsv
opendatastructures chapters --fields title,url

# Limit results
opendatastructures chapters -n 5

# Full help
opendatastructures --help

Every command shares one output contract: -o table|json|jsonl|csv|tsv|url|raw, --fields to pick columns, --template for a custom line, and -n to limit. The default adapts to where output goes (a table on a terminal, JSONL in a pipe), so the same command reads well by hand and parses cleanly downstream.

Commands

Serve it

The same operations are available over HTTP and as an MCP tool set for agents, with no extra code:

opendatastructures serve --addr :7777    # GET /v1/chapters  returns NDJSON
opendatastructures mcp                   # speak MCP over stdio

Use it as a resource-URI driver

opendatastructures registers an opendatastructures domain the way a program registers a database driver with database/sql. A host enables it with one blank import:

import _ "github.com/tamnd/opendatastructures-cli/opendatastructures"

Then ant (or any program that links the package) dereferences opendatastructures:// URIs without knowing anything about the site:

ant get opendatastructures://page/<path>   # fetch the record
ant cat opendatastructures://page/<path>   # just the body text
ant ls  opendatastructures://page/<path>   # the pages it links to, each addressable
ant url opendatastructures://page/<path>   # the live https URL

Development

cmd/opendatastructures/   thin main: hands cli.NewApp to kit.Run
cli/                      assembles the kit App from the opendatastructures domain
opendatastructures/       the library: HTTP client, data models, and domain.go (the driver)
docs/                     tago documentation site

make build      # ./bin/opendatastructures
make test       # go test ./...
make vet        # go vet ./...

Releasing

Push a version tag and GitHub Actions runs GoReleaser, which builds the archives, Linux packages, the multi-arch GHCR image, checksums, SBOMs, and a cosign signature:

git tag v0.1.0
git push --tags

The Homebrew and Scoop steps self-disable until their tokens exist, so the first release works with no extra secrets.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.