I’ve been spending a lot of time sourcing and recruiting engineers at work recently. Here are a few command lines I’ve used to extract project names, URLs, and author names and email addresses from pip (Python) and npm (Node/JavaScript) packages we use, using the invaluable jq.

Not all packages will have author names or emails, and not all of them will be individual people, but the majority are. And yes, I do feel a bit gross doing this. But it’s for a good cause!

The commands below output tab-separated columns to stdout that you can import into your spreadsheet or ATS of choice.

Pip

In virtualenv/lib/python*/site-packages/:

jq -r '(.extensions."python.details"? // .) as $base | [.name, .summary, $base."project_urls".Home?, ($base.contacts? // [] | map(.name) | join("; ")), ($base.contacts? // [] | map(.email) | join("; "))] | join("\t")' */metadata.json

NPM

In node_modules/:

jq -r '((if (.maintainers? | type) == "array" then .maintainers? else [.maintainers?] end) as $maintainers | (if (.author? | type) == "array" then .author? else [.author?] end) as $authors | ($authors + $maintainers) as $people | [.name?, .description?, .homepage? // .repository.url? // .bugs.url? // .bugs?, ($people | map(.name? // .) | join(", ")), ($people | map(.email?) | join(", "))]) | join("\t")' */package.json \
  | sed -E 's/, \t/\t/g; s/\t, /\t/g; s/, $//; s/git:\/\//https:\/\//g'