Automatically update your CONTRIBUTORS file with this GitHub Action + Workflow

Posted 1 year ago in

My Workflow

I wanted to build something simple but yet useful for open source maintainers. So here's what I built: an action to automatically generate a CONTRIBUTORS.md file based on a project's top contributors, using the GitHub API to pull information about the project. The workflow then uses another action to create a pull request or commit the changes directly to the same repository where the workflow is configured.

Automated pull request with github actions

The action runs a single-command application created with Minicli, a minimalist command-line framework for building PHP CLI commands.

The application, action, and example workflows can be found here:

https://github.com/minicli/action-contributors

Note: If you want to learn how I built this, check out this post: How to build GitHub Actions in PHP with Minicli and Docker.

Submission Category:

Maintainer Must-Haves

Yaml File or Link to Code

Here is an example workflow to run this action once a month and commit the changes directly to the main project's branch:

name: Update CONTRIBUTORS file
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 1 * *"
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  main:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: minicli/action-contributors@v2
        name: 'Update a projects CONTRIBUTORS file'
        env:
          CONTRIB_REPOSITORY: 'minicli/minicli'
          CONTRIB_OUTPUT_FILE: 'CONTRIBUTORS.md'
      - name: Update resources
        uses: test-room-7/action-update-file@v1
        with:
          file-path: 'CONTRIBUTORS.md'
          commit-msg: Update Contributors
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

You need to replace the CONTRIB_REPOSITORY value with the GitHub project you want to pull contributors from.

If you'd prefer to create a pull request instead of committing the changes directly to the main branch, you can use the create-pull-request action instead. For that, you'll also need to include the actions/checkout GitHub Action:

name: Update CONTRIBUTORS file
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 1 * *"
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  main:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: minicli/action-contributors@v3
        name: "Update a projects CONTRIBUTORS file"
        env:
          CONTRIB_REPOSITORY: 'minicli/minicli'
          CONTRIB_OUTPUT_FILE: 'CONTRIBUTORS.md'
      - name: Create a PR
        uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v3
        with:
          commit-message: Update Contributors
          title: "[automated] Update Contributors File"
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Additional Resources / Info

Projects using this action:

If you want to learn how I built this, check out this post: How to build GitHub Actions in PHP with Minicli and Docker.

Erika Heidi