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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing guide

Thanks for considering a contribution to this project! 🙏

Local development with Docker 🐳

Requirements 📝

Setup 🛠

  1. Clone and navigate to the repo: 
    $ git clone https://github.com/bcanseco/github-contribution-graph-action.git
$ cd github-contribution-graph-action
  2. Create an .env file: 
    $ cp .env.schema .env
  3. Fill in the values.
    • GITHUB_ACTOR: Set this to your GitHub username.
      • e.g. bcanseco
      • Note that when running as a GitHub Action, the user doesn't need to provide this.
    • GITHUB_REPOSITORY: Set this to your username followed by a slash and your repository name.
      • e.g. bcanseco/github-contribution-graph-action
      • Again, this is only necessary when running locally.
    • GITHUB_TOKEN: Set this to your personal access token.
      • Make sure to check the Repo boxes.
      • Note that the personal access token has more permissions than the GITHUB_TOKEN provided by the Actions runner. Read more about this here.
    • GIT_EMAIL: Set this to an email associated with your GitHub account.
    • GIT_BRANCH: Set this to master.
  4. Make sure your Docker daemon is running.

Running 👟

Use the commands below to build and run a container:

$ docker build -t github-contribution-graph-action .
$ docker run --rm github-contribution-graph-action

You can alternatively run npm start directly without Docker, but this isn't recommended.

Q&A 🤔

Why is this a Docker action and not a JavaScript action? 📦

Two reasons:

  1. For things like this that mess with the git CLI directly, it's easier to test with containers.
  2. You cannot currently specify an npm run-script (e.g. npm start) as an entrypoint with JavaScript actions.

Why go with Unix rather than ISO for ORIGIN_TIMESTAMP? ⌚

For some reason, the GitHub Actions runner mutates ISO timestamp strings passed as environment variables into something unparseable by the date-fns library.

Why use environment variables instead of inputs? 🔌

Two reasons:

  1. GitHub transforms input parameter casing and prepends INPUT_, so additional code would be necessary to revert this before processing them.
  2. Input parameters are expected to be documented in the action definition, which would be yet another source of truth to maintain.

Why not add a cool CUSTOM_TEXT feature for writing on the grid? 🎨

This is a great idea! In theory, this GitHub Action could re-draw your custom string of text every week or so. That way it stays in the center of your contribution graph.

Unfortunately though, commits made on a GitHub repository will always show on the graph even if those commits are later removed through a force push. This means that every time we would try to re-draw, the old text would remain on your graph.

You can already imagine the consequences:

  • Text overlapping
  • Seeing last year's strings cut-off
  • Repeated text

A workaround involves deleting and recreating the GitHub repo for the user on each run, but that requires permissions that the GITHUB_TOKEN doesn't provide. For now I'm calling this out-of-scope, but feel free to open an issue if you have any ideas.