Automation using GitHub Action to add Blogs o GitHub Profile

Many years ago, a wise man once told me, "Why spend 5 minutes doing something when you could spend 5 hours failing to automate it?"

One of the secrets to productivity in life is AUTOMATION! As I plow through life I try to delegate anything repetitive to the automation so I can focus on things that are important in life

When it comes to software development my favourite continuous integration and continuous delivery tool is GitHub Actions.

Do you want to show your blogs on your GitHub Profile?

If yes, you're in the right place. By the end of this article, you'll have your latest articles listed on your GitHub profile README using Github Action Automation.

First of all lets understand:

What's GitHub Actions?

Events:

When you host your code on GitHub, there are certain events that can take place, such as when you push code in your main branch or someone makes a pull request to merge changes into your code or maybe opens up an issue. There is huge list of events that can happen to your repository.

Actions:

Now with an action you can trigger some code to run automatically when one of these events take place. In the background, GitHub will triggers and run the code to automate things like testing, deployment and so on.

Benefits of using GitHub Actions:

Along with the N number of benefits GitHub Actions offers, like seamless integration, flexibility, scalability, and cross-platform support, it is also very cost-effective.

Computing the same things on the cloud might cost money, but GitHub provides a very generous free tier for us that most people won't exceed.

🏃🏼Let's Get Started!

Prerequites:

GitHub Account: https://github.com
Basics of YAML
Basics of Markdown (Markup Language)

We'll be using the blog-post-workflow GitHub Action created by Gautam krishna R.

🤔 How to use this GitHub Action?

Visit your GitHub Profile README repository
```
 https://github.com/{USER-NAME}/{USER-NAME}
```
Example: https://github.com/boradesanket13/boradesanket13
Add the following section to your README.md file.
```
 # 📩 Latest Blog Posts
 
 
```
- This # 📩 Latest Blog Posts is simple H1 heading in Markdown. You can write anything as per your choice.
-   marks the start and end of your blogs list.
Create a folder .github in the root directory & within that directory create another folder named workflows.
```
 .github 
    └───workflows
```
If you're struggling in creating a folder in the GitHub repository from a web app: To create a new folder in a repository click “create a new file.” Type your new folder’s name in the area where you would write the file name, and at the end of the file name type a “/” to initilize it as a folder. After this you can create a new file in the folder.
Inside the workflows directory create a new YAML file named blog-post-workflow.yml. This is how your folder structure should look like:

.github 
   └───workflows
           blog-post-workflow.yml

Add the following content in the blog-post-workflow.yml file

 name: Latest blog post workflow
 on:
  schedule: # Run workflow automatically
    # This will make it run every hour
    - cron: '0 * * * *' 
   # Run workflow manually (without waiting for the cron to be called), through the Github Actions Workflow page directly
  workflow_dispatch: 
 jobs:
  update-readme-with-blog:
    name: Update this repo's README with latest blog posts
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: gautamkrishnar/blog-post-workflow@master
        with:
          # Replace this URL with your rss feed URL/s
          feed_list: "https://boradesanket13.hashnode.dev/rss.xml"

Add your RSS Feed URL in place of my URL in the last line at feed_list

Commit your code and wait for your actions to run automatically or here are the steps to trigger it manually:
- Click on Actions
- Then, click on Latest blog post workflow
- Now, click on Run workflow to trigger the GitHub Action