An exercism wrapper for fish

This provides additional subcommands that I find useful to improve my experience working locally.

A typical workflow

(~)$ cd (exercism workspace)
(~/s/e/exercism)$ cd wren                    # working on the wren track
(~/s/e/e/wren)$ exercism exercises           # I've _almost_ finished it
+----------------------------+----------------------------+------------+-----------+
| title                      | slug                       | difficulty | status    |
+----------------------------+----------------------------+------------+-----------+
| Clock (*)                  | clock                      | easy       |           |
+----------------------------+----------------------------+------------+-----------+

+-----------+-------+
| completed | total |
+-----------+-------+
| 61        | 62    |
+-----------+-------+
(~/s/e/e/wren)$ exercism download -r     # get the "recommended" next exercise
(~/s/e/e/w/clock)$ #...edit/test...
(~/s/e/e/w/clock)$ exercism submit
(~/s/e/e/w/clock)$ exercism open         # see how it looks online
(~/s/e/e/w/clock)$ exercism publish      # Done!

Subcommands

All gloriously tab-completed.

override or augment existing exercism subcommands:

• download
  • after downloading, cd to the solution directory
  • you can omit the --track option if the function can figure it out
  • use the --recommended option to download the next recommended exercise (usually the first "available" exercise in the track)
• test
  • run test suite for this exercise
  • enhances the builtin exercism test with some custom behaviour for some tracks.
• submit
  • with no arguments, uploads the solution file from .exercism/config.json
• open
  • open your solution's iterations page in a browser

additional subcommands for interacting with solutions

• check, format
  • run formatters and/or linters for this exercise
  • only some tracks currently supported
  • "format" is an alias for "check"
• publish
  • mark the exercise as complete, and enables comments on the public solution
• refresh
  • re-download the current solution (based on $PWD)
  • I use this mainly to refresh the .exercism/ directory
• square1
  • Destroy your current solution (!) and reset it back to its initial contents
• iterations
  • list the iterations for one or all solutions in a track
• last-test-run
  • show the data about the test run of the last iteration.
• metadata
  • a dump of the exercism backend's data about an exercise

subcommands to feed my obsession at keeping up-to-date solutions

• bulk-download
  • bulk download all your solutions for a track.
  • handy for those who store their solutions in a git repo.
• sync
  • updates the exercise
    • this is like clicking "See what's changed" in the "This exercise has been updated..." banner, then clicking the "Update exercise" button
  • requires the presence of the .exercism/ directory: you may need to exercism refresh first
• test-all
  • run test suite for all downloaded exercise in a track
  • only some tracks currently supported (the ones I've joined)
• cleanup
  • cleanup build artifacts from track exercises
  • useful to remove huge node_modules subdirectories (unless you use pnpm)
  • not all tracks supported
• tracks
  • list all Exercism tracks, and your progress through each.
  • --get option to download all track's config.json files to your cache directory.
• exercises
  • list the exercises, and your progress, for a track.
• syllabus
  • create a _concepts directory for a track, linking the Concept name to the exercise's README.
• by-exercise
  • create a _by_exercise directory mapping exercises you've completed to the tracks you've completed them in.

commands related to your activity on exercism

• achievements
  • list your track trophies and badges
• notifications
  • list recent notifications
• reputation
  • recently awarded reputation

mentoring sub- and sub-subcommands

This subcommand is itself subdivided.

• mentoring queue
  • show your current mentoring queue, sorted by age
• mentoring request
  • display a summary of a mentoring request
  • it is necessary to call mentoring queue first
• mentoring inbox
  • list the discussions in your mentoring workspace
• mentoring discussion
  • display the posts of the discussion
  • it is necessary to call mentoring inbox first
  • options exist to post to the thread, and to end the discussion.
• mentoring overview
  • display your unread notifications, mentoring queue and inbox.

track development

• stats
  • extracts statistics for all tracks' exercises
  • use --download option to fetch all the config.json files into your cache directory.
• dev unimplemented
  • lists unimplemented, foregone or deprecated exercises.
  • with --stats option, show stats for this track's unimplemented exercises. Useful for selecting the next exercise to implement.
• dev difficulties
  • lists each exercise and its difficulty

Github queries for the Exercism organization

• github teams
  • lists the teams you're a member of.
• github team
  • lists the members of a team.
• github prs
  • lists my open Exercism PRs
• github issues
  • lists my open Exercism issues

"Offline" operation

As of summer 2026, to combat DDOS attacks, Exercism has configured the Cloudflare layer to block most API calls from robots. This disables some of the functionality of this wrapper :(

Some subcommands have been made aware of this, and can operate in a "non-API" fashion. To enable this, fetch the active track config.json files from GitHub using:

exercism tracks --get

fish setup

Add to ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

set exercism_wrapper_home /path/to/the/exercism/wrapper/root
if not contains $exercism_wrapper_home/functions $fish_function_path
    set fish_function_path $exercism_wrapper_home/functions $fish_function_path
end
if not contains $exercism_wrapper_home/completions $fish_complete_path
    set fish_complete_path $exercism_wrapper_home/completions $fish_complete_path
end
set -e exercism_wrapper_home

Tools used herein

• exercism and fish of course!
• curl
• jq
• miller
  • to print tables with pretty boxes.
• pup for parsing HTML (like jq for HTML)
• for mentoring discussions rendering of posts:
  • ruby
  • colorize gem
  • @html-to/text-cli npm package
• gh for the Github queries

Assuming fish and Homebrew are already installed:

brew install exercism curl jq miller node gh
gem install colorize
npm install --global '@html-to/text-cli'
go install 'github.com/ericchiang/pup@latest'