Being any developer we generate a lot of code and push it to Github for backup, managing software versions, hosting projects, and other many tasks. If we talk about how many repositories are actual projects, we host and showcase in our resume/social media, it’s way too less than compared to the total number of repositories created. These include forked repositories, some practice codes uploaded or some additional content to refer to.

I have created a lot of them, and now when I have to showcase my projects, I get confused about which one should be included or what I have made! To solve this dilemma, I came up with a solution to develop a Github action to automate adding projects, hackathons attended, display some Github profile stats, and optionally, display the latest blogs written over medium and my website and to take it to next level, I dockerized the action and hosted the webpage for free! Let’s see how I made it.

What is GitHub Action?

Github action enables you to automate and customize the software development cycle of testing and deploying the application all integrated into your repository. These actions are called jobs and they can be scheduled to run according to your needs via Cron jobs, which are time-based job schedulers. If you visit the GitHub action documentation, you might get confused between two terms, actions and workflows. These are confusing things which need to be cleared before proceeding:

1. The major difference between action and workflow is that one is part of others. Actions are the events that are triggered when a particular workflow is executed.
2. Actions are the tasks that are executed in the code environment while workflows manage how these tasks will be performed, what will be their order, any dependencies/setup to be done before running them, inputs, arguments to pass, or defining the dependency between the different jobs.
3. A workflow may have several actions running sequentially or in parallel, depending upon the configuration assigned.

Now that you have a basic understanding of Github’s action, let’s code the actual script, which will be part of this action.

Scripting Time!

For this project, I am using Python as it’s easy for me to code in it plus there are fewer actions built using Python. This project requires access to Github profile data, though Github API provides most of the data, it is still restricted to 60 requests per hour for non-authenticated users. Therefore, you need a Personal access token (Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Tokens) which authenticates the user to Github and allows 5000 requests per hour!

To start, install PyGithub library for all the headaches of making connections, pagination of results, and finally fetching the data. Next, we need to store the data returned by the API. I choose the dictionary format because it is easy to manage and access the attributes. This is what the initial code looks like:

from github import Github


git = Github("TOKEN HERE")
user_object = git.get_user()
git_username = user_object.login
user_data = {'username': git_username,
            'git_photo_url': user_object.avatar_url, 
            'git_bio': user_object.bio, 
            'git_email': user_object.email, 
            'git_followers': user_object.followers,
            'git_following': user_object.following,
            'name': user_object.name,
            'latest_updated': str(user_object.updated_at)}

FROM python:3

RUN pip install -Iv PyGithub==1.53
COPY ./ /gen_index

ENTRYPOINT ["python", "/gen_index/generate_index.py"]

.github/workflows folder.

name: Latest portfolio
on:
  schedule:
      # Runs at the end of every day.
      - cron: '0 0 * * *'
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:     
  job_1:
    name: update-index-with-project
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
        - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        - uses: kaustubhgupta/[email protected]
          with:
            gh_token: ${{ secrets.TOKEN }} # Create a secret for access token and modify the name as you wish
  
        - uses: test-room-7/action-update-file@v1
          with:
            file-path: |
              index.html
            commit-msg: index file added
            github-token: ${{ secrets.TOKEN }}

name: Latest blog post workflow
on:
  push:  # Everytime index.html is pushed, this action runs and updates the blogs section!
    
jobs:
  update-readme-with-blog:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
        - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        - uses: gautamkrishnar/blog-post-workflow@master
          with:
            feed_list: <Your feedlist>
            max_post_count: 7
            readme_path: index.html
            template: "$newline <h2 class='h2-blog'><a class='a-lightblue' href=$url>$title</a></h2>$newline <br>"  # Do not change the template as it will not render good results!
            gh_token: ${{ secrets.TOKEN }}