Sisyphus

[zeke]

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.

I maintain a lot of "data modules". Unlike most npm modules, these modules are datasets, scoured from various corners of the internet on a regular schedule. An example is all-the-package-names, which is updated daily (aspirationally, anyway). For each one of these modules, I run a Heroku app with the Scheduler addon (think cron) to run some task (usually npm run release) every ten minutes, hour, or day.

These Heroku apps typically have two environment variables, a GitHub token and an npm Token. These secrets are made available to the running app through the use of buildpacks. The whole thing is outlined in a blog post here: http://zeke.sikelianos.com/npm-and-github-automation-with-heroku

Rather than running and configuring a single Heroku app for every module, I'd rather use a single Probot service to publish all of them.

Probot has a scheduler extension that would work for this... the remaining puzzle piece is how to handle secrets. Where would Probot get an npm token? (See https://github.com/probot/friction/issues/34)

[Pushplaybang]

Love this. 👍 no idea where to keep em though.

[pvinis]

maybe the config repo?

[zeke]

In the time since I created this issue, GitHub has released some new features that enable new ways to build "sisyphean" workflows:

🔑 There's a new GitHub API for storing secrets on a repo: https://developer.github.com/actions/managing-workflows/storing-secrets/

🕐 GitHub Actions now have a cron-like scheduling feature: https://developer.github.com/actions/changes/2019-04-05-scheduling-workflows/

GitHub Developer

Storing secrets

Get started with one of our guides, or jump straight into the API documentation.

GitHub Developer

Scheduling Workflows

Get started with one of our guides, or jump straight into the API documentation.