readme-scribe

A GitHub Action that automatically generates & updates markdown content (like your README.md)

Instructions

1. 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

2. 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

Now create a new secret in your repository's Settings and enter that token.

3. 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/[email protected]

      - uses: muesli/[email protected]
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PERSONAL_GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          template: "templates/README.md.tpl"
          writeTo: "README.md"

      - uses: stefanzweifel/[email protected]
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          commit_message: Update generated README
          branch: main
          commit_user_name: readme-scribe 🤖
          commit_user_email: [email protected]
          commit_author: readme-scribe 🤖 <[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.

Example output