instapaper

What This Skill Does

The Instapaper CLI skill allows you to interact with the Instapaper service through the ip command-line interface. It is designed for users needing to automate bookmark management, extract article text, synchronize reading lists, or perform bulk operations like moving items between folders or managing highlights. The skill provides a robust bridge between the raw CLI output and your automation tasks, ensuring that you can leverage structured formats like NDJSON for large datasets or reliable stderr parsing for error handling. It abstracts the complexity of authentication, cursor-based pagination, and request flow control into simple natural language requests.

Installation

To use this skill, ensure the ip binary is installed in your system PATH. You can install it via Go (go install github.com/vburojevic/instapaper-cli/cmd/ip@latest) or via Homebrew (brew tap vburojevic/tap && brew install instapaper-cli). Once installed, ensure your INSTAPAPER_CONSUMER_KEY and INSTAPAPER_CONSUMER_SECRET are properly set as environment variables. Run ip doctor --json to verify that your authentication credentials and network connectivity are configured correctly before running any high-volume automation tasks.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for complex workflows such as: performing periodic incremental backups of your reading list to a local JSON database using --updated-since, extracting full text content from your saved articles for offline reading or local indexing, organizing your archive by programmatically moving items into specific folders, or troubleshooting sync issues by leveraging debug flags and structured stderr reporting. It is particularly useful for power users who want to avoid the manual effort of using the web interface for bulk cleanup or curation tasks.

Example Prompts

1. "List all unread bookmarks from the last week and save them as an NDJSON file in my local reports directory."
2. "Move all articles containing the word 'AI' in the title to my 'Tech' folder and confirm once finished."
3. "Sync my Instapaper highlights to a local Markdown file; please use cursor-based pagination to ensure no items are missed."

Tips & Limitations

Always avoid using the default table output for any parsing tasks, as it is strictly designed for human readability and may change. Instead, favor --ndjson or --json for programmatic consumption. When performing bulk mutations, utilize --dry-run to preview changes before they are applied. Be mindful that API rate limits apply; the tool handles these internally, but avoid excessive polling in tight loops. For security, never store your credentials in plain text scripts—use password-stdin to pipe them securely.