How to Build a Dynamic GitHub Profile with GitHub Actions and PHP

Last year, GitHub quietly released a feature that was quickly noticed by the community — profile READMEs

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

A profile README is a global README file for your GitHub profile, which you can set up by creating a public repository whose name is identical to your GitHub username. For instance, as my username is osteel, I created the osteel/osteel repository.

A little box like this one should appear while you add your own:

Once the repository is created, add a README file with a short description explaining how great you are, and your GitHub profile page will display its content by default:

Neat and simple.

As I was browsing examples for some inspiration, I stumbled upon Simon Willison’s version, which features some dynamic content like recent work and blog publications. He explained how he used a combination of GitHub Actions and Python to achieve this in a blog post, and I decided to do something similar with PHP.

The placeholder

The first thing to do is to create a placeholder in the README file where the dynamic content will go. Since I wanted to automatically insert the latest publications of my blog, I used the following tags:

<!-- posts --><!-- /posts -->

You might recognise this format; since Markdown files also support HTML, I used some HTML comment tags to make sure they wouldn’t show up on my profile page.

The PHP script

I can’t remember the last time I wrote some PHP without a framework; as a result, I had to do a quick search just to get started with a basic PHP script and some Composer dependencies.

Turn out it’s quite simple! The first step is to initialise the project with the following command:

$ composer init