Franklin is a command line utility, written in crystal, that allows searching public libraries powered by Overdrive. It supports multiple library searching for those that have accounts in more than one library (city, county, state, etc.)

I previously wrote a version of this library in ruby.

In order to use, this program must be compiled from source. A working crystal compiler is needed. The version is governed by .tool-versions and can be installed with asdf.

To install, clone this git repo:

$ git clone git@github.com:ylansegal/franklin.cr.git

Run tests:

$ make test

To build a binary:

$ make bin/franklin

Note: If you are using a Mac and homebrew, and you are getting errors related to libssl, it's likely that you need to set an environment variable to let crystal know where openssl is located. See crystal-lang issue #4745 for more information.

If you encounter error messages like these:

ld: warning: no platform load command found in '/Users/ylansegal/.cache/crystal/Users-ylansegal-Personal-franklin.cr-spec/C-rystal.o0.o', assuming: macOS

You can solve them by setting the following environment variable:

export CRYSTAL_OPTS="--link-flags=-Wl,-ld_classic"

Franklin needs to be configured with information about the Overdrive libraries it will search. It expects a file in YAML format to exist in your home directory called .franklin. The contents of the file should look like:

---
libraries:
  - name: San Francisco Public Library
    url: https://sfpl.overdrive.com
  - name: San Diego County Library
    url: https://sdcl.overdrive.com
default_type: eBook # Optional, will show all types if not set.

There needs to be a minimum of one library, but there is no maximum. The name can be anything and will be included when the search results are presented. The url should point to the domain of the public library. It can be obtained by visiting Overdrive's site for each library, copying the url and stripping everything after the domain name.

Once the library has been installed and configured, the franklin executable will be available. It can be called from the command line with the list of terms to be searched for:

$ bin/franklin chamber of secrets
Searched for: chamber of secrets
======================================================
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
By J.K. Rowling
Format: Audiobook
Availability:
  2.8 people/copy @ San Francisco Public Library
  15.5 people/copy @ San Diego Public Library
  1.3 people/copy @ San Diego County Library
  5.4 people/copy @ Los Angeles County Library
======================================================
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
By J.K. Rowling
Format: eBook
Availability:
  0.9 people/copy @ San Francisco Public Library
  Available @ San Diego Public Library
  0.6 people/copy @ San Diego County Library
  0.0 people/copy @ Los Angeles County Library
======================================================
Harry Potter
By Chris Peacock
Format: eBook
Availability:
  2.5 people/copy @ San Francisco Public Library
  1.0 people/copy @ San Diego Public Library
======================================================
Room at Heron's Inn
By Ginger Chambers
Format: eBook
Availability:
  Available @ San Francisco Public Library
======================================================
The Secret of the Fiery Chamber
By Carolyn Keene
Format: eBook
Availability:
  Available @ San Diego County Library

Franklin supports using a different path for the configuration file and filtering results by type (ie, eBook, Audiobook, etc).

See franklin --help for more information.

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[your-github-name]/franklin/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

• [ylansegal] Ylan Segal - creator, maintainer