How To Easily Automate Your Github Profile to Showcase Your Work

Including Github Activity, Medium articles & YouTube channels

I have a confession to make. I’m lazy when it comes to updating my Github profile. I love creating content (both here and on Youtube). And I know I should really link to it from my GitHub profile. But when it comes to actually doing the drudge work of linking everywhere to it I just can’t be bothered, even though I know it makes sense. But I subscribe to the “automate all the things” mantra. And if I can learn stuff in the process, it’s a win/win.

And Github gives us the means to automate processes, using a tool called Github Actions. So let’s see what we can do with that. We will be :

· Creating a profile repository
· Setting up the Markscribe Template
· Fetching Medium’s RSS Feed
· Fetching YouTube content & stats (using Shields.io)
· Configuring GitHub actions
∘ Create the Personal Acces Token
∘ Create the GitHub Action
· And Sitting back and Relaxing (or not)

(And if you want a peek at the end result, you can see my automatically updating profile. )

Creating a profile repository

The first step, if you haven’t done so yet, is to set up a special repository in GitHub that will serve as your profile repository (i.e. a README.md file in the repository provides the content for the profile page). This is really simple: for a personal account, create a repository with the same name as your GitHub user name. For an organization profile, create a repository called .github.

GitHub will now tell you that you’ve found a special repository. Yay \o/ The first step is to clone that repository locally onto your computer. Once that is done, we’re ready to move on. All the rest below is done within the repository.

Setting up the Markscribe Template

We’ll be using Markscribe, a templating system for producing markdown files, using the go template language syntax. If you don’t know how to use the go template…