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au CLI Installation

The au command line interface (CLI) has the following tool dependencies:

  • python (>= 3.12)
  • pipx or pip (python package managers)
  • git (Git command line interface)
  • gh (GitHub command line interface)

If you already have these installed and configured, then you can skip directly to the Install au-tools section.

Install Dependencies

If you don't already have Python version 3.12 or higher installed, then you will need to do so. This process differs significantly between platforms, so will be beyond the scope of this guide.

Likewise, Python's pip package installer is required, but its installation can differ significantly between platforms. Just be sure that python --version (substitute python3 if appropriate on your platform) and python -m pip --version show a python version of 3.12 or greater.

Install git and gh CLI tools

The au commandline tool makes extensive "behind the scenes" use of both the git and gh command line tools. As such, you should insure that these tools are installed in your environment of choice. For example:

Using the winget from the terminal: 

winget install Git.Git
winget install GitHub.cli

Using Homebrew from the terminal: 

brew install git
brew install gh

Using apt from the terminal: 

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git
sudo apt install gh

Configure git

If you've never configured the git CLI tool, now is the time. You must minimally identify yourself when committing to a repository, so configure your identity as follows:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

You should verify you configured things correctly by listing your global configuration:

git config --list --global

Authenticate using gh

In the past, managing authentication with GitHub using the git CLI was somewhat painful. Fortunately, the GitHub's CLI makes this process mostly transparent now. The process is outlined in detail in the GitHub documentation. However, in short you simply need to do the following.

  1. From the terminal, run: 
    gh auth login
  2. Select "GitHub.com" as the account to login to
  3. Choose HTTPS as the preferred protocol
  4. Select Y to authenticate Git with your GitHub credentials
  5. Choose to "Login with a web browser"
    • copy the one-time code
    • open the browser (note that if a default web browser cannot be opened you simply need to open a browser window to https://github.com/login/device)
    • login to GitHub if needed
    • Paste in your one-time code
    • Click the "Authorize github" button (If using a Passkey you may be required to use it at this point)
  6. The process is now complete, and the gh command in the terminal should now show you as logged in.

To test your configuration, you can run git clone [PRIVATE_REPO_URL] and ensure that you are not prompted for a user id or password. If not, then you have successfully authenticated both git and gh and you can continue to install and use au.

Install au-tools

Currently the au CLI is only installable using Python's pip installer or the pipx package manager. pipx automatically uses virtual environments to isolate the au CLI from the rest of your local Python environment, so this is the recommended approach.

Installation via pipx

First you must install pipx. You can consult the full pipx documentation. But in short, you should run something similar to the following to install pipx.

Assuming pip is installed (substitute pip3 if appropriate): 

pip install pipx
pipx ensurepath


sudo apt update
sudo apt install pipx
pipx ensurepath

Once installed, pipx usage is quite similar to most other package managers. To install the au CLI, you can now simply pipx install it in the terminal:

pipx install au-tools

Though slightly simpler, this method is not recommended as it installs the au CLI and all of its dependencies as global- or user-level Python packages. This tends to "pollute" your core Python environment and can cause issues with package interdependency and version conflicts. In fact, the latest releases of most Linux distributions simply disallow installing packages via pip unless you are doing so inside of a virtual environment.

However, if you do wish to proceed with this option and/or you have manually configured a Python virtual environment, then simply pip install it from the terminal:

pip install au-tools

Upgrading au

Upgrades to the au cli will be published regularly to the PyPI.org repository. Thus, upgrading your installation requires simply telling your package manager to check for and install upgrades.

pipx upgrade au-tools

pip install --upgrade au-tools

VisiData

VisiData is an amazing terminal-based tool for analyzing data. Although total overkill, it's lightning fast to start up and a great way to view CSV files (like course rosters and grades).

Install is also quite simple. And I again recommend pipx, though pip works just fine, as well.

pipx install visidata

pip install visidata