🚀 Announcing pastebin-bisque v1.0

Earlier this week, I released v1.0 of pastebin-bisque, the most popular piece of software I have written. You can get this version by running:

pip install pastebin-bisque

Once it’s installed, run pastebin-bisque --help for more information.

❓ What is pastebin-bisque and why would anyone use it?

✨ Great question! ✨ It’s a program that downloads every public Pastebin post by a specific user.

Let’s say that there is a user on Pastebin who has posted a bunch of stuff that you are interested in. Instead of downloading it all manually, you can run pastebin-bisque -u exampleusername. That will download every public post that user has posted.

👩‍🍳 Why was pastebin-bisque made?

I was doing some ransomware research and I was interested in the ransomware notes that Michael Gillespie had on his Pastebin profile: it’s an interesting, large public set of samples. I wanted an excuse to apply what I had been learning about Beautiful Soup and this Web scraping project presented the perfect opportunity.

🆕 What’s new in v1?

For users: There are no changes in functionality in this version. The biggest difference for users is that you install the package from PyPI (pip install pastebin-bisque) and that you run the program with pastebin-bisque. All of the command line flags are the same.

For contributors: there are a few significant changes and improvements. The program is now distributed as a Python package. The code that does the heavy lifting is in src/pastebin_bisque/cli.py instead of main.py. Additionally, you will find tests that you can run with tox and a GitLab CI configuration that ensures all is well. Check out the docs on how to contribute for more information.

🐈‍⬛ What’s next?

For you: consider running pip install pastein-bisque — on a machine that you’re comfortable using to download stuff from Pastebin.

For me: well, I’m writing this from a rooftop in Amsterdam on my birthday. 🎂 I think I’ll log off and celebrate a bit more. 🎊

💖 Be well.