Configuration

In this document we will explain how pygscholar is working underneath and how to configure it.

How is it working

When you add an author to the database, pygscholar will add the author to a file called authors.json in a cache directory. By default this is set to a directory called .pygscholar in your home directory. However, you can also specify a different directory by setting the environment variable PYSCHOLAR_CACHE_DIR to the desired directory. This is convenient if you want to work with different departments. Note also that you can pass the cache directory in as an argument to most commands.

For the list-new-dep-publications command, it will also keep track of all the publications for the department in a file called publications.json in the cache directory. Whenever, it recognizes a publication that is not listed in this file, it will report it as a new publication.

Set up slack bot

It is also possible to make post updates about new publications to slack. To do this you can use the command post-slack-new-dep-publications. In order for this to work you need to first make sure to install the slack_sdk

pip install slack_sdk

and then set up a slack bot as described at https://github.com/slackapi/python-slack-sdk/blob/main/tutorial/01-creating-the-slack-app.md. You need to also pass the Bot User OAuth Access Token to pygscholar. You can do this in three ways

• Setting the environment variable SLACK_BOT_TOKEN to the token value, or

• Creating a file called ~/.pygscholarrc or a file inside the cache directory called config with the following content

  [SLACK_BOT_TOKEN]
  token = xoxp-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  

  where you swap out xoxp-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with your token