Resource URIs

twitch is a command line, but the twitch Go package is also a small driver that makes Twitch addressable as a resource URI. A host program registers it the way a program registers a database driver with database/sql, then dereferences twitch:// URIs without knowing anything about how Twitch is fetched.

The host that does this today is ant, a single binary that puts one URI namespace over a family of site tools. The examples below use ant; any program that links the package gets the same behaviour.

Mounting the driver

A host enables the driver with one blank import, exactly like import _ "github.com/lib/pq":

import _ "github.com/tamnd/twitch-cli/twitch"

The package's init registers a domain with the scheme twitch (alias ttv) for the hosts twitch.tv, www.twitch.tv, clips.twitch.tv, and m.twitch.tv. The standalone twitch binary does not change.

Addressing records

A URI is scheme://authority/id. The twitch driver exposes these authorities:

URI	What it is
twitch://channel/<login>	one channel, keyed by its login
twitch://video/<id>	one video, keyed by its numeric id
twitch://clip/<slug>	one clip, keyed by its slug
twitch://game/<slug>	one category, keyed by its slug

ant get twitch://channel/shroud              # the channel record
ant get twitch://video/<id>                  # the video record
ant get twitch://clip/<slug>                 # the clip record
ant url twitch://game/just-chatting          # the live https URL
ant resolve https://www.twitch.tv/shroud     # a pasted link, back to its URI

The same classification runs offline through the binary: twitch ref id <ref> turns any reference into its (kind, id), and twitch ref url <kind> <id> builds the canonical URL.

Walking the graph

ls lists the members of a collection, and every member is itself an addressable URI, so a host can follow the graph and write it to disk:

ant ls     twitch://channel/shroud            # videos and clips on this channel
ant export twitch://game/just-chatting --follow 1 --to ./data

When records carry edges through kit:"link" tags, ant export --follow and ant graph walk those edges too, across tools when a link points at another site's scheme.

Why this is the same code

The driver and the binary share one definition per operation. A resolver op answers both twitch channel show on the command line and ant get twitch://channel/... through a host, from the same handler and the same client. There is no second implementation to keep in step.