Using Github Actions to fetch content

I recently added more automation around my blog post publishing workflow. Previously, I shared how I use Obsidian to write blog posts. In this post, I want to show you what automation I’ve added to help publish a post.

Before I dive in, I need to provide some context. This site is separated into two repos. A website repo, that’s where all the AstroJS goodness lives. And then a content repo, that’s where all my posts live. The content repo is a Git submodule inside the website repo. These two are separated for a few reasons:

• I can keep my content commits separate from my website commits.
• I have dedicated version control over my content.
• I have visibility controls over my content. Meaning, I can set my content to provide if I ever wanted to.

Unfortunately, with two separate repos, I have a few extra steps to publish. I need to push the new post to the content repo. Then pull in those changes to the website repo, before pushing again.

Automation introduced

I used two Github Action scripts to automate fetching the latest content changes, and pushing to main.

In my content repo, I have a script that runs whenever I push to main:

name: Trigger deploy
on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Trigger parent repository update 
        run: |
          curl -XPOST https://api.github.com/repos/jonathanyeong/personal-website/dispatches \
          -H 'Accept: application/vnd.github+json' \
          -u jonathanyeong:${{ secrets.ACCESS_TOKEN }} \
          --data '{"event_type": "deploy content changes"}'

This script will dispatch an event to my website repository whenever there’s a push to main. The data field doesn’t matter, and could be whatever event type you want. GitHub has more docs on creating a repository dispatch event.

In my website repo, I have a script that listens to dispatch events and runs when it receives one.

name: "Fetch Content Updates"
on: [repository_dispatch, workflow_dispatch]
jobs:
  pull_content_updates:
    name: pull_content_updates
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          submodules: true
      - name: Pull submodule
        run: |
          git pull --recurse-submodules
          git submodule update --init --recursive --remote
      - name: Push changes
        run: |
          git config --global user.email "hey@jonathanyeong.com"
          git config --global user.name "Jonathan Yeong"
          git add .
          git commit -m "[Workflow] Updating website content"
          git push

The repository_dispatch handler will watch for dispatch events. When it gets one, it will pull down the latest changes from the submodule, and then push the updates to main. Here are the GitHub docs on repository_dispatch. After pushing to main branch on my website repo, Netlify will build my site and publish it.

Note: I included workflow_dispatch so I can manually trigger a content fetch, and push for testing.

What’s next?

These GitHub Actions were my first foray into automating my workflow. And I’d love to do more. It’d be great to have a linter that would catch any markdown issues before I pushed. I also want to automate pushing posts to the content repo. It would be cool if I had a “publish” button in Obsidian that would do a commit and push for me.