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. 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 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.

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

From there, I installed a lightweight library to parse my blog's RSS feed:

$ composer require dg/rss-php

I then added a

posts.php

file at the root of the project, with the following content:

Nothing too complicated here – Composer's autoload is required at the top, allowing me to load the RSS parser to generate a list of blog posts as a string, in Markdown format.

The existing content of the

README

file is then loaded into the

$content

variable, and the Markdown string is inserted between its

<!-- posts -->

and

<!-- /posts -->

tags with

preg_replace

.

Finally, the file's entire content is replaced with the new one, using the

file_put_contents

function.

GitHub Actions are a fairly recent addition to GitHub, allowing developers to automate various CI/CD tasks, like running test suites or deploying web services.

They must be defined using YAML format in a

.github/workflows

folder at the root of the project, and contain a list of steps that they are to execute.

Here's mine, which I named

posts.yml

:

Again, nothing too complicated. We first give the action a name, and then define a list of events that should trigger it – pushing some code to the repository, a manual trigger from the interface (

workflow_dispatch

), or periodically like a cron job (here, every day at midnight).

We then indicate that the action should run on an Ubuntu image, where it will:

That's it! My GitHub profile is now automatically updated every time I publish a new article.

This was a quick experiment aiming at exploring GitHub Actions, which I expect to use more and more in the future. It was also fun to use PHP as a simple scripting language again, in a procedural way.

I've voluntarily left out a few things in order to keep this article short and simple – please refer to the repository for implementation details.