Generate Jekyll pages with GitHub actions

Now that I have customised Jekyll I want to simplify my workflow.

Although I am starting this with a bunch of actual posts, most of my content will be links. I usually share these as soon as I’ve followed the link and read the content, usually straight from my phone while browsing in the evening.

I therefore need the ability to generate links entries on my site as easily as possible, from my phone.

My plan is to use GitHub actions with a manual trigger to generate the markdown files, with action inputs matched to the required front-matter variables.

Generate files with GitHub actions

First of all, what do I need to generate files in my repository from a GitHub action? We’ll the Write File Action, as echoing echo each line in a run step looks like a pain.

The content of the file is easier to define as a multiline string, indicated wth a pipe |.

I also need to set the date in the filename. I’ll do it as per this SO answer, which uses the ::set-output:: workflow command.

Finally, we need to commit the file back to main. Unfortunately this doesn’t trigger our jekyll build action, as explained here :sad:

At this stage I have not figured out why using a personal token hasn’t worked around this issue…. To be continued

Plan B is to use a repository_dispatch event trigger as per this article.

Which works!!

Final workflow definition looks like this (check the repo for the latest definition)

name: Generate a new file in the _links folder

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      title:
        description: 'A user friendly name/description for the URL we are sharing'     
        required: true
      target:
        description: 'The URL we are sharing'     
        required: true
        default: ''
      source:
        description: 'Where (free text) did we find out about the URL we are sharing'     
        required: true
        default: 'the internet'
      source_url:
        description: 'Where (URL) did we find out about the URL we are sharing'     
        required: false
      tags:
        description: 'Space separated list of tags'     
        required: true
      blurb:
        description: 'Some text to explain why you are sharing'     
        required: true
        default: 'This looks interesting...'

jobs:
  newlink:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Clone repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Generate the filename
        id: filename
        run: |
          date="$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')"
          filename="${date}-$.md"
          echo "filename = ${filename}"
          echo "::set-output name=filename::${filename}"

      - name: Generate new link file
        uses: DamianReeves/write-file-action@v1.0
        with:
          path: _links/$
          write-mode: append
          contents: |
            ---
            title: $
            target : $
            source : $
            source_url : $
            tags: $
            ---

            $

      - name: Commit and push files
        run: |
          git config user.name "NewLink GitHub Action"
          git config user.email "<>"
          git add _links/$
          git commit -m "New link: $"
          git push https://$@github.com/$.git main

      - name: Trigger jekyll build
        run: |
          curl -X POST https://api.github.com/repos/$/dispatches \
          -H 'Accept: application/vnd.github.everest-preview+json' \
          -u $ \
          --data '{"event_type": "New link: $", "client_payload": { "customField": "customValue" }}'

Tags

Generate files with GitHub actions