Ask HN: How do you automate file upload to GitHub?
8 points by sirspacey 10 months ago
I’ve been exploring Git workflows and curious how others would approach this challenge:
We need to upload a file to GitHub on demand (a table routing JSON file to minimize API calls) and want to automate it so non-technical users can push the file.
Our ideal workflow is to generate the JSON and push automatically via webhook or API call
How would you approach it? Things you’d be concerned about with this approach?
Some additional context:
- We have to solve this problem in this way due to limitations with another code base we rely on.
- this is a private repo so we aren’t concerned about merge issues, just overwriting the file is fine
#!/bin/bash
commandToGenerateFile > file.json #or wget some.server.tld/autogen.json file.json git add file.json git commit -m "Automatic upload <date>" git push
You can do this in any number of ways. Powershell, batch script, bash, you could even build a little GUI if you want.
If you want to get fancier, throw the script on a server and give users an SSH script they can double-click, or hook it up to some intranet web interface.
This isn't a particularly complex problem, and git was designed to handle use cases just like this.
Of course you could absolutely overcomplicate and burn dozens of engineer hours building some kubernetes cluster or AWS swarm, but you can do this with a script so simple that I wrote it on my phone.