Google API

To experiment with LLMs I chose to use Gemini. The cost is modest and I expect Google to regularly improve the model so that it remains competitive. I wrote a Gemini client in Common Lisp. Some people have already forked the repo, but I've refactored things recently so I thought I'd give a quick rundown of the code.

google repository

https://github.com/jrm-code-project/google

When I add APIs to Google, I intend to put them in this repository. It is pretty empty so far, but here is where they will go. Contributions welcome.

Basic Requirements

There are some basic libraries you can load with Zach Beane's Quicklisp. alexandria for some selected Common Lisp extensions, cl-json for JSON parsing, dexador for HTTP requests, and str for string manipulation. I also use series (available from SourceForge). My own fold, function, named-let, and jsonx libraries are also used (available from GitHub).

fold gives you fold-left for list reduction. function gives you compose. jsonx modifies cl-json to remove the ambiguity betweeen JSON objects and nested arrays. named-let gives you the named let syntax from Scheme for local iteration and recursion.

Google API

The google repository contains the beginnings of a Common Lisp client to Google services. It currently only supports an interface to Blogger that can return your blog content as a series of posts and an interface to Google's Custom Search Engine API. You create a Google services account (there is a free tier, and a paid tier if you want more). You create a project (you'll want at least a default project), and within that project you enable the Google services that you want that project to have access to.

API Keys and Config Files

For each service you can get an API key. In your XDG config directory (usually "~/.config/") you create a googleapis directory and subdirectories for each project you have created. The ~/.config/googleapis/default-project file contains the name of your default project. In the examples below, it contains the string my-project.

Within each project directory you create subdirectories for each service you want to use. In each service directory you create a file to hold the API key and possibly other files to hold IDs, options, and other config information. For example, for Blogger you create ~/.config/googleapis/my-project/Blogger/apikey to hold your Blogger API key and ~/.config/googleapis/my-project/Blogger/blog-id to hold your blog ID.

Here is a sample directory structure:

  ~/.config/googleapis/
    ├── my-project/
    │   ├── Blogger/
    │   │   ├── apikey
    │   │   └── blog-id
    │   ├── CustomSearchEngine/
    │   │   ├── apikey
    │   │   ├── hyperspec-id
    │   │   └── id
    │   └── Gemini/
    │       └── apikey
    └── default-project

When you create the API keys for the various services, it is a good idea to restrict the API key for only that service. That way, if the API key is compromised, the damage is limited to a single service.

Blogger

The blogger API will eventually have more features, but it currently only allows you to get the posts from a blog as a series.

scan-blogger-posts blog-id
Returns a series of posts from the blog with the given ID. Each post comes back as a JSON object (hash-table). The :content field contains the HTML content of the post.

Custom Search Engine

The Custom Search Engine API allows you to search a set of web pages. You create a search engine on Google and pass the ID custom-search. It is assumed that the default CustomSearchEngine id is a default, vanilla search, and that the hyperspec id searches the Common Lisp Hyperspec.

In each search, be sure to replace the spaces in the query with plus signs (+) before searching.

custom-search query &key custom-search-engine-id
Returns search results for query. Each search result comes back as a JSON object (hash-table).

web-search query
Search the web and return search results for query. Each search result comes back as a JSON object (hash-table).

hyperspec-search query
Search the Common Lisp Hyperspec and return search results for query. Each search result comes back as a JSON object (hash-table).