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hili

Barebones server that listens for clips to save text and images from the web. Includes a set of clients to send clips from various apps:

Firefox is the best supported client. If you are offline, hili queues the snippets to send when a connection returns (you need to leave the tab open until they are successfully sent; there's a little indicator that lets you know how many snippets are queued).

Firefox

To install (Firefox), open about:debugging and choose "Load Temporary Add-on", then select the manifest.json file. This is temporary (but useful for development); the add-on will be gone next time you run Firefox.

To install it more permanently:

If you're running Firefox Developer Edition, you should be able to:

  1. Zip up the extensions directory
  2. Go to about:addons, then Install Add-on From File, and select the zipped extension

Otherwise, the process is more involved:

  1. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/api/key/ (create a Firefox account if necessary) and generate credentials
  2. Install web-ext: npm install -g web-ext
  3. Navigate to the extensions folder and run: web-ext sign --api-key=<JWT issuer> --api-secret=<JWT secret>
  4. This will create an .xpi file in web-ext-artifacts.
  5. Go to about:addons, then Install Add-on From File, and select the .xpi file.

You can also install it from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hili/

Note this no longer works because the latest Firefox for Android removes support for sideloading extensions (Fenix): To install on mobile, the easiest way is to visit this url from your phone: https://frnsys.com/misc/hili.xpi.

If using the latest version of Firefox Nightly for Android (Fenix), you must first enable General Extension Support. You can then use this collection id: 14770219 and user id: hili or add it to your own collection.

Server

server.py launches a simple HTTP server that accepts any data at localhost:<PORT>/ and saves it to a specified file.

Basic usage is: python server.py <SAVE FILE> <UPLOAD DIRECTORY> [-p <PORT>] [-k <AUTH_KEY>]

For example: python server.py ~/notes/annos.json ~/notes/saved_files -p 8888 (localhost:8888 is the default endpoint).

You can specify an authentication key with -k. Only requests with this key will be accepted by the server; use the settings page to configure hili to use this key (see below in Settings).

You can visit this server (e.g. localhost:8888) to view your highlights.

You can also replace this server with whatever server you want, using server.py as a starting point. In the extension options you can specify any endpoint to send the selections to.

Usage

Once the extension is installed:

  1. Run the server, e.g. python server.py ~/notes/annos.json ~/notes/saved_files
  2. Highlight some text on a page, and click the "Highlight" button that appears

I suggest running the server on system startup as a background process. E.g. you could add cd ~/hili; python server.py ~/notes/annos.json ~/notes/saved_files to your ~/.xinitrc or equivalent file.

You can also view your highlights by visiting the server address, e.g. localhost:8888

Settings

You can configure the url that hili sends to, and an optional secret key (see the Server section above), from the settings page.

Listener scripts

If you want something to happen whenever a new highlight is received, you can do something like:

#!/bin/bash
ANNOS_PATH=~/notes/web/annos.json

tail -n 0 -f $ANNOS_PATH | while read line; do
    # do something here, e.g. pass $line to another script
    echo $line
done