Using a label to trigger automation with GitHub Actions

I have been evolving my website over the last few weeks - football season is over - and I am using GitHub Actions to automate my processes and essentially use GitHub’s Issues as a content management system (CMS).

CMSs typically have a database backend see WordPress and MySql, there are headless CMSs like Strapi that offer up an API from datasources, but being a cheapskate and hosting my website on GitHub pages I don’t have the option of a database. So using the tools at hand I am able to create an issue in GitHub using issue templates (these help structure the content and automatically applies labels).

From these I can then trigger an action that either converts an issue to a markdown file as a post or by adding some data to a yaml file - Jekyll my static site generator uses yaml files (along with CSV and JSON) as data sources.

the below action shows a check against the labelname to make sure the right action runs by passing the variable into another action called runner.

Data in yaml files can be looped over at build time to create tables, lists. Using the liquid templating language one can sort and group data too. Such that i now record podcasts, books, websites, films, football teams and a to do list all in yaml files ans all managed by GitHub’s issues.

Published 4 June 2022, with 237 words.