GitHub Repository Scheduled Update Using GitHub Actions

Introduction

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline. There could be some other cool things that can be automated by GitHub Actions, such as closing stale GitHub issues, tagging GitHub merge requests, or even crypto mining (strongly discouraged)!

In this blog post, I would like to quickly show how to use GitHub scheduled actions to update the repository itself routinely.

What’s the Date Today?

In this example, we created a GitHub repository “What’s the date today?” whose README contains the date today that will be automatically updated everyday using GitHub Actions.

More specifically, what we have to do are as follows.

• Create an empty repository.
• Turn on the repository write permission for GitHub Actions.

• Create the following yaml file and placed it in the .github/workflows directory.

update-date.yml

name: GitHub Self-Updating Repository Demo

on:
  # https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/events-that-trigger-workflows#schedule
  schedule:
    # The shortest interval you can run scheduled workflows is once every 5 minutes.
    # Note: The schedule event can be delayed during periods of high loads of GitHub Actions workflow runs. 
    # High load times include the start of every hour. 
    # To decrease the chance of delay, schedule your workflow to run at a different time of the hour.
    # Every 5 minutes.
    # - cron: '*/5 * * * *'
    # At the beginning of every day.
    - cron: "0 0 * * *"

# on: [push]

jobs:
  report:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Check out repository code
        # https://github.com/actions/checkout/tree/v3.0.2
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Modify date and time
        run: |
          date > README.md
          cat README.md
      - name: Push to repository
        run: |
          git config --global user.name "Lei Mao"
          git config --global user.email "leimao@users.noreply.github.com"
          now=$(date)
          git add -A
          git commit -m "Auto Push on $now"
          git push

References

• “What’s the date today?” - GitHub
• Quickstart for GitHub Actions