Automatically update your GitHub readme through GitHub Actions

Pawel Grzybek has set up a workflow that uses GitHub Actions’ Scheduled Events to automatically update his profile README.md. It runs every 6 hours and pulls in his RSS feed to populate the README.md

import fs from "fs";
import fetch from "node-fetch";
import parser from "xml2json";

const FEED_URL = "https://pawelgrzybek.com/feed.xml";
const TAG_OPEN = `<!-- FEED-START -->`;
const TAG_CLOSE = `<!-- FEED-END -->`;

const fetchArticles = async () => {
  const articles = await fetch(FEED_URL);
  const articlesText = await articles.text();
  const articlesJSON = parser.toJson(articlesText);
  const newC = JSON.parse(articlesJSON).rss.channel.item.slice(0, 5);

  return newC.map(({ title, link }) => `- [${title}](${link})`).join("\n");
};

async function main() {
  const readme = fs.readFileSync("./README.md", "utf8");
  const indexBefore = readme.indexOf(TAG_OPEN) + TAG_OPEN.length;
  const indexAfter = readme.indexOf(TAG_CLOSE);
  const readmeContentChunkBreakBefore = readme.substring(0, indexBefore);
  const readmeContentChunkBreakAfter = readme.substring(indexAfter);

  const posts = await fetchArticles();

  const readmeNew = `
${readmeContentChunkBreakBefore}
${posts}
${readmeContentChunkBreakAfter}
`;

  fs.writeFileSync("./README.md", readmeNew.trim());
}

try {
  main();
} catch (error) {
  console.error(error);
}

Fetch most recent posts to your GitHub profile page using GitHub workflow and Node.js →