A GitHub Action that automatically generates & updates markdown content (like your README.md)
- Create a markscribe template and
place it anywhere in a repository that you automatically want to update. In this
guide we will use
templates/README.md.tpl
.
You can find an example template that I use to automatically update my GitHub profile here: https://github.com/muesli/markscribe/blob/master/templates/github-profile.tpl
- In order to access some of GitHub's API, you need to provide a valid GitHub
token as a secret called
PERSONAL_GITHUB_TOKEN
. You can create a new token by going to your profile settings:
Developer settings
> Personal access tokens
> Generate new token
Depending on your template you will need access to different API scopes. If you
want to support the full set of features, tick the checkboxes next to these
scopes: read:user
, repo:status
, public_repo
, read:org
. Check out the
markscribe documentation for a detailed
list of required scopes for each individual template function.
Now create a new secret in your repository's Settings
and enter that token.
- Create a new GitHub workflow in your repository:
.github/workflows/readme-scribe.yml
name: Update README
on:
push:
schedule:
- cron: "0 */1 * * *"
jobs:
markscribe:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@master
- uses: muesli/readme-scribe@master
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PERSONAL_GITHUB_TOKEN }}
with:
template: "templates/README.md.tpl"
writeTo: "README.md"
- uses: stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action@v4
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
with:
commit_message: Update generated README
branch: main
commit_user_name: readme-scribe ๐ค
commit_user_email: [email protected]
commit_author: readme-scribe ๐ค <[email protected]>
Careful: if you use master
instead of main
as the default branch, you will
need to update the above config for git-auto-commit-action
accordingly.
This action will be triggered once per hour, parses templates/README.md.tpl
and generates a new README.md
for you, and eventually pushes the changes to
the master
branch. Make sure to adjust the input values template
and
writeTo
to suit your needs.