Github Actions

• Github actions allow you to create workflows likes the one you can have in a ci/cd system

Right now I have a couple of scripts that allow me to write using roam and publish to my blog. and a circle ci pipeline that bring that executes the script, and I wanted to check if I could do the same but using github actions.

You can go to one of your repositories, click in actions, and then in clic

and then in setup workflow my self

Now you will have the whole control to create your workflow in an editor! you can see the workflow specification in https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions

My small project is about updating my blog, with the content of my roam research notes.

• Basically there are some notes that have a special annotation blog:: that I want to import them into my hugo static generated blog

HERE SHOULD GO A HAND DRAW ARCHITECTURE OF THE PROJECT!

So what do I need to make it work:

1. Execute an action every 1h
2. This action will execute my roam-export project and will download my whole roam database, for that I will need to store my password of roam in a secured way
3. Filter and transform this markdown files into actual markdown for hugo
4. Add this files to a second repository and push the changes.

Let’s see if we can do it!

• Execute every 1 hour:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron:  '0 * * * *'

• Store some secret in github

You can add the secrets in the github repository, you can see the documentation here https://docs.github.com/en/actions/configuring-and-managing-workflows/creating-and-storing-encrypted-secrets

that’s how the step for executing looks like

    - shell: bash
      env:
        ROAM_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.ROAM_USERNAME }}
        ROAM_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.ROAM_PASSWORD }}
        ROAM_DATABASE: ${{ secrets.ROAM_DATABASE }}
      run: |
        cd export
        npm install
        node index.js
        

I got some problems on unzip the zip file in github actions, cause the file that you download from roam-research ahs something “wrong”, it’s just a warning but it just cancels the pipeline.

I had to do a lot of trial and error commits, which is kind of ugly, I did a bit of search if you could https://github.com/nektos/act I didn’t set it up, but looks promising :)

• Transforming the roam markdown files into hugo post files, is quite easy to automate. Just a execute a couple of scripts that were already there from my integration with drone.io

    - name: transform to hugo markdown
      shell: bash
      run: |
        mkdir posts
        pip3 install -r transform/requirements.txt
        cd zip
        find . -name \*.md -exec python3 ../transform/blog.py -i {} -o ../posts/ \;

Booom Done!

• Push to my other repository where I store my blog :)

that’s the trickiest part, I suppose I could create a secret with my a ssh key that I only use for push to the repository, but I saw an github action already that instead uses github token. I will copy part of this action in my workflow. Thanks cpina for the code ^^ https://github.com/cpina/github-action-push-to-another-repository

- First, we need to generate an github API token


    - Go to the Github Settings (on the right hand side on the profile picture)
    - On the left hand side pane click on "Developer Settings"
    - Click on "Personal Access Tokens" (also available at https://github.com/settings/tokens)
    - Generate a new token, choose "Repo". Copy the token.
- Now we need to add this token as a secret in the repository:

    - Go to the Github page for the repository that you push from, click on "Settings"
    - On the left hand side pane click on "Secrets"
    - Click on "Add a new secret" and name it "API_TOKEN_GITHUB"
- Now we can do a git clone with the token, and will allow us to do a a push as well.

Again all this code is a copy of the https://github.com/cpina/github-action-push-to-another-repository, just that I didn’t want to delete anything, and that’s why I am not using the action directly but just copying it.

    - name: push to my blog
      shell: bash
      env:
        API_TOKEN_GITHUB: ${{ secrets.API_TOKEN_GITHUB }}
      run: |
        git config --global user.email "kozko2001@gmail.com"
        git config --global user.name "kozko2001"
        git clone "https://$API_TOKEN_GITHUB@github.com/kozko2001/blog-hugo.git" "blog"
        ls blog/
        cp posts/* blog/content/posts/
        git -C blog/ add .
        git -C blog/ status
        git -C blog/ commit -m "add content from roam-export"
        git -C blog/ push

• Conclusions

Github actions are nice and easy to use, they remind me a lot of droneCI, which you can build the steps with docker containers and use commands inside. Which is exactly what github actions does.

I understand this is a really nice feature, which is free and eases the use of CI/CD practices on more projects (specially small ones), and the abstraction of each step is just a docker container resonates really well in my head.

But on the other hand, I just feel all the inovation brought by small and motivated open source projects, has been just ripped and copied. And with it a lot of motivation…

You can find the final pipelin here https://github.com/kozko2001/roam-export/blob/master/.github/workflows/main.yml