Weeknotes: GitHub Actions, switching gears on my fanfiction tracker

Week ending 11-4-22

New TILs:

I'm trying to work in public more, and break up the things I learn into smaller chunks, and practice more writing, so this week I distilled wha I learned from GH Actions into some TILs.

• Running an action conditionally
• Setting output for a step in a job, so a different job can use it
• Making one job in a workflow depend on another job
• Parsing JSON output from a GitHub Issue template in a GitHub Action
• Creating a new file and committing it using a GitHub Action

ao3-tracker

I'm going in a different direction with this. I honestly don't want to build a UI. I like using GH on my phone, but you can't directly edit files on mobile.

Current plan is this workflow to manage TBRs:

• Submit a new issue with a template
• GH action will auto-tag the issue with tbr
• GH action will look at issues tagged tbr and find the link
• Link gets passed to Python script that:
  • Goes to AO3 to get data
  • Parses data into JSON
  • Uses JSON to generate YAML
  • Writes the YAML to a new file
• GH action that commits the resulting new file to main
• GH action that re-writes a TBR table in the style of my TIL readmes
• Will prove the concept in a public repo, then fork it to a private one to keep my TBRs private

Since I was doing a lot of testing of GH actions, my commits and PRs are all over the place. But here is what I worked on, broadly speaking. (Though almost every PR had a follow-up series of commits directly to main as I debugged what was wrong in the action.)

I really need a CI step that validates my YAML. So many syntax errors.

• #49 Add conditional logic to an action to only run on certain labels
• #60 Action to close an issue after it's been commented on
• #64 Add action to parse the JSON of an issue
• #66 Hide Django since I'm not planning to use it and it distracts me.

media

• 📺 Severance season 1: Too dark for me. Didn't make it past the pilot.
• 📺 Jane the Virgin season 1: Rewatch and loving it.