What Are GitHub Actions?
GitHub provides a way to automate CI/CD processes via GitHub Actions. When these were first announced I was excited for what the could do for my team when we had a PR or commit.
This week I stumbled across a blog post by Swyx. He wrote about Data Scraping with GitHub Actions. I was inspired to give it a try with the Deno Disney Scraper.
Do You YAML?
Once the scraper script was created, implementing an action was pretty straight forward.
on:
# schedule will use cron notation, there are other options to use on events
schedule:
# * is a special character in YAML so you have to quote this string
- cron: "*/5 * * * *"
# everytime the main branch is pushed it runs the script as well
push:
branches:
- main
# name for the action
name: Scrape Disney Times
jobs:
build:
name: Scrape-Times
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
# checkout the code
- uses: actions/checkout@main
# get a library to run deno
- name: Setup Deno Module
uses: denolib/setup-deno@master
# run the deno script
- name: Scrape
run: deno run --unstable --allow-net --allow-write --allow-read get_data.ts
# check in the results
- name: Publish
uses: mikeal/publish-to-github-action@master
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
BRANCH_NAME: "main"The setup took a while. on: push: works flawlessly. Every time I pushed the branch it would run without issue. I did run into an issue with on: schedule. It seems that the cron job set to every 5 minutes doesn’t always run!. I’ve reached out to a few people who are more familiar than I am with actions and it seems that everything is set up correctly.
Over all I really like it and can’t complain for a completely free service. If I was using a paid tier I would be much more concerned about actions not always firing.
If you run into any issues or questions hit me up on Twitter