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2 min read
On Hacker News I discovered the article Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub. I was very fascinated about this new GitHub feature and wanted to build something similar for my GitHub profile.
GitHub Profile README
GitHub profile READMEs are a new feature that allows users to have the content of a README markdown file rendered at the profile page.
To use this feature you just need to create a new repository that has the same name as your GitHub account. Mine is located at github.com/mokkapps/mokkapps.This repository needs to be public and initialized with a README:
Now you will see a new section at the top of your profile page which renders the content of this new README file:
In my example, I am showing five links to the latest blog posts on my website and the latest tweet I published on Twitter. This information is automatically updated and I want to show you how I implemented this functionality.
Automatically Update The README
All the magic is happening in a GitHub Action defined in build.yml. This action runs on every Git push, every 32 minutes past the hour (configured via a cron schedule) or by manually clicking a button in the GitHub Action UI (by using workflow_dispatch event).
The workflow performs these actions:
- Fetches the latest tweet from my Twitter account using the Twitter API, renders it to a PNG using headless Chrome (from an R script) and saves it as PNG which is then embedded in the README (taken from zhiiiyang).
- Runs a JavaScript script which fetches the five latest blog posts from my RSS feed and generates the final
README.md(inspired by simonw) - Commits and pushes the changes to the master branch of this repo
The JS script is quite simple and has only ~50 lines of code.
Conclusion
The GitHub profile READMEs are a cool feature and by using GitHub Actions it can help us to provide up-to-date information for profile visitors.
But most importantly I had a lot of fun building it and this is more important than everything else.
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