github-to-pdf

A CLI tool that fetches a GitHub file by URL and renders it as a PDF with line numbers without any syntax highlighting. This was largely vibe coded and then tweaked by a human to make it as desired. It's an activate work in progress so apologies for the ugly README.

Installation

Probably unnecessary?

I don't think you need to do this? But now i can't remember so keeping it here

pip install -e ".[dev]"

venv

You need to create and activate a virtual environment (venv) for it to run properly.

To create do the following inside the pdf-maker folder: python -m venv venv This creates the virtual environment. You only need to do this once source venv/bin/activate This activates the virtual environment. You have to do this every time you want to activate the venv

Once you are done, to deactivate the venv do: deactivate

activate toml

The cli command is defined in pyproject.toml To use it, you first have to install it in the venv as follows:

pip install -e .

If this errors, make sure you are using the pip in the venv, not the system pip (i.e., do which pip) A lot of problems can be solved by just uninstalling and reinstalling venv.

Running the CLI

Basic usage:

github-to-pdf https://github.com/owner/repo/blob/main/path/to/file.py

This saves file.py.pdf in the current directory.

Options:

Option	Description
--output / -o PATH	Custom output PDF path (default: <filename>.pdf)
--no-color	Disable syntax highlighting; render plain monospace

Examples:

# Custom output path
github-to-pdf https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/setup.py -o requests_setup.pdf

# Plain monospace (no syntax highlighting)
github-to-pdf https://github.com/encode/httpx/blob/master/httpx/__init__.py --no-color

Key files

File	Purpose
github_to_pdf/cli.py	Click CLI entry point — parses options, orchestrates fetch → render
github_to_pdf/fetcher.py	parse_github_url (URL → metadata dict) and fetch_raw_content (httpx GET to raw.githubusercontent.com)
github_to_pdf/renderer.py	render_pdf — Pygments tokenisation + ReportLab PDF generation with line numbers and Monokai theme
pyproject.toml	Build metadata, runtime dependencies (click, httpx, pygments, reportlab), dev dependencies (pytest, pytest-httpx, Pillow)

Running tests

pytest tests/

Test file	What it covers
tests/test_cli.py	CLI integration: valid URL → exit 0 + success message; invalid URL → exit 1 + error message; --output flag; --no-color flag
tests/test_fetcher.py	parse_github_url for simple and nested paths, wrong domain, missing blob segment, too-short URLs; fetch_raw_content success (200), 404, and 500 using pytest-httpx mocks
tests/test_renderer.py	render_pdf produces a valid %PDF file; handles unknown file extensions; handles empty code string

Dependencies (brief)

• click — CLI framework
• httpx — async-capable HTTP client for fetching raw GitHub content
• pygments — syntax tokenisation and colour lookup
• reportlab — PDF document generation