How I Built A Self-Updating README by Webhooks and Netlify Functions.

Generate README by Github Action

Github profile READMEs allowing users to create own content of REAMDE markdown file rendered at profile page.

Visit github.com/RaoHai and you'll see a list of posts. I do this with a Github Action in yuque.yml, the workflow configured to run on every push event and workflow_dispatch event.

The action runs actions/yuque-to-readme, which take your yuque API token and retrieve your posts from yuque. Then read given template file, then generate README.md by handlebars:

<h2>Hi, I'm Rao Hai! <img src="https://github.githubassets.com/images/mona-whisper.gif" height="24" /></h2>
<img align='right' src="https://media.giphy.com/media/836HiJc7pgzy8iNXCn/giphy.gif" width="230" />
<p><em>Front-end Engineer at <a href="https://www.alipay.com/">Alipay</a> . </em>

<h4> Latest Blog Posts: </h4>

{{#each record}}
  - [{{title}}](https://yuque.com/{{@root.namespace}}/{{slug}}) - {{short created_at "MM-dd HH:mm"}}
{{/each}}

<p align="right"><a href="https://www.yuque.com/luchen/buzhou">➡️ More blog posts</a></p>
<p align="right">
  Generated by
  <a href="https://github.com/marketplace/actions/yuque-to-readme">actions/yuque-2-readme</a>
</p>

-----
<a href="https://github.com/RaoHai/RaoHai/workflows">
<img align="right" alt="Build README" src="https://github.com/RaoHai/RaoHai/workflows/yuque/badge.svg?branch=master" />
</a>
<a  href="https://www.yuque.com/luchen/buzhou/qqi7hq">
How this works
</a>

Whole scripts of yuque-to-readme is here.

It Also have a datoCms version datocms-to-markdown, It'll generate README.md from given datoCMS project.

Scheduling Workflow via Webhooks

Although that Github Actions schedule event allows you to trigger a workflow at a scheduled time just like

on:
  schedule:
    - cron:  '*/15 * * * *'

But I am skillfully doing this: yuque.com allows call a Webhook while a document area created or updated, so I hosted a Netlify Functions that exposed a Webhook API.

It dispatches a workflow_dispatch event by Github Api when it has been called. The yuque.yml workflow then scheduled.

Conclusion

This post provides a solution for scheduling workflow using Webhooks in building Github profile READMEs. Considering this workflow runs very fast, so maybe trigger it at a scheduled time is a more simple way, depends on you. :D.