Doing stupid stuff with GitHub Actions

I really enjoyed Jonty Wareing&#x27;s hack recently where he built a static site generator inside a GitHub Action that works by doing the following:<p>1. Spin up a Python Flask web server on localhost<p>2. Run &quot;wget --mirror&quot; against it to crawl the site and save it as static files<p>3. Publish the resulting static files to GitHub Pages<p>The workflow is here. It&#x27;s genius: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pubstandards&#x2F;pubstandards-london&#x2F;blob&#x2F;89989bd3e3e2391425bc8e76055e90892635ec5a&#x2F;.github&#x2F;workflows&#x2F;build.yml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pubstandards&#x2F;pubstandards-london&#x2F;blob&#x2F;899...</a>

For anybody interested in playing around with and hacking on different CI &#x2F; devops stuff I recently launched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boxci.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boxci.dev</a>, which is a distributed CI service where the builds run on your own hardware, via a lightweight runner that just does coordination and runs build shell commands on bare metal, so it&#x27;s a bit more hackable &#x2F; flexible than (for instance) GH actions &#x2F; Gitlab CI.<p>It&#x27;s free to sign up and play around with it, and I&#x27;d love to get the feedback of any HNs who think this could be useful (I basically built it because it&#x27;s the CI service I want to exist, and I think others might too).

The &quot;Holiday Reminder&quot; could actually send a somewhat puzzling notification about you needing to check out the GitHub pipeline for a production failure. I would for sure forget about even setting it up and would shit my pants on New Year&#x27;s Eve... and then have a good laugh on myself.

I rarely see a sense of humor on HN. It’s a nice surprise and I hope to see more of it. Nice job!

Reminds me of my first year in college, when we&#x27;d log into each other&#x27;s machines at the computer lab for some intro to computing class, and launch a fork-bomb script that simply launched itself twice, quickly rendering the machine useless. The tricky part was to test it without halting your own machine, as a newbie programmer and Unix user.

I&#x27;ve used GH Actions to replicate LinkedIn&#x27;s Endorsements feature on their new Profile Readme feature: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sw-yx&#x2F;sw-yx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sw-yx&#x2F;sw-yx</a>

Unlike the authoer, I haven&#x27;t found Github Actions very intuitive to work with :)<p>I&#x27;ve asked this before on a similar post, maybe someone here knows. Has anyone managed to get a Pre-Release to track Master using Github Actions? I can&#x27;t seem to find a working example that does this (and I can&#x27;t seem to cobble one together myself)<p>There are a few things that are seemingly intentionally left out of GitHub Actions... like you can create new Releases on a push, but there is no direct way to delete&#x2F;update a release with fresh builds.<p>I know you can just get build artifacts - but those are not publicly available and hard to link people to.

Alternative idea for exponential action: action that creates another action (automate a headless browser, or maybe github has an api for that?). Kill switch: delete the repo :)

The real question is, are Github Actions Turing complete?

With the new GitHub profile README feature, GitHub Actions gained a lot of traction. I&#x27;m using it to automatically display my latest blog post [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darekkay.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;github-profile-readme&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darekkay.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;github-profile-readme&#x2F;</a>

I was reading all the comments and found it really interesting. Thanks for the post.

I work on a product similar to Github Actions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cto.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cto.ai&#x2F;</a> but there is a built in interaction layer for interacting from Slack channels.

nice site, it&#x27;s clean