dedao-dl

What This Skill Does

The dedao-dl skill provides a sophisticated interface for the OpenClaw AI agent to interact with the dedao-dl CLI tool. It facilitates the seamless discovery, management, and downloading of educational content from the Dedao (得到) platform. Whether the user is interested in personal development, professional courses, audiobooks, or ebooks, this skill enables the agent to fetch metadata, navigate course structures, and retrieve content in various formats including PDF, MP3, and Markdown.

Installation

Before initiating any tasks, you must ensure the environment is correctly set up. First, execute the installation script via python scripts/install_dedao_dl.py to deploy the latest binary. Following installation, all interactions with the CLI should be routed through scripts/run_dedao.py rather than the raw executable. This wrapper is critical because it standardizes output formatting, allowing the agent to parse text responses accurately without the need for redirection or complex file processing. Always verify system requirements for specific formats, such as ensuring wkhtmltopdf is installed for PDF rendering and ffmpeg is available for audio processing.

Use Cases

• Personal Archiving: Users can batch-download their purchased premium courses as Markdown files for long-term offline storage and searchability.
• Content Conversion: Effortlessly switch between listening to content in MP3 format during a commute and reading detailed lecture notes in PDF or Markdown format.
• Knowledge Management: Integrate Dedao content into personal knowledge bases (e.g., Obsidian or Notion) by utilizing the Markdown generation feature with index prefixes.
• Content Preview: Browse free content sections to identify new topics of interest before making a purchase decision.

Example Prompts

1. "Check who is currently logged into the Dedao CLI and then list all the courses I have purchased."
2. "Download the latest article from my 'Mastering Productivity' course as a single merged Markdown file, including hot comments."
3. "Find the free course with ID 'free_science_01' and download all its articles into a folder for offline study."

Tips & Limitations

• Respect Rate Limits: When performing bulk downloads—especially for PDFs—be mindful of the platform's anti-bot mechanisms. Frequent requests can lead to '496 NoCertificate' errors. Introduce sleep delays if scripting large operations.
• Permission Matters: Never trigger a full course download (using only a course ID) without explicit user permission to prevent massive data consumption or account flagging.
• Format Defaults: Use Markdown (-t 3) as your primary output format unless specified otherwise, as it offers the best balance of readability and integration with note-taking tools.