Posts tagged GitHub

How to use GitHub Actions to automatically upload to GitHub Wiki

GitHub is a great platform for hosting open source projects. It provides a lot of features for free, including a wiki for documentation. However, the wiki is primarily designed to be edited through the web interface. This is not ideal for a lot of reasons as it makes it difficult to track changes from the repository. But there is a way to automatically upload to the wiki using GitHub Actions as GitHub provides a way to checkout the wiki as a separate repository.

The first step is to create a GitHub Action that will upload the wiki. This can be done by creating a new file in the .github/workflows directory. The following example shows how to create a GitHub Action that will upload the wiki on every push to the master branch and on every change to the .github/workflows/wiki.yml file or the wiki directory.

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Create a bootable ISO with kickstart

Installing Linux on a physical or virtual machine can be fun for a couple of time, but configuring a system can be combursome after a couple of times. Red Hat developed Kickstart to install and configure machines via the network, but also as part of an ISO file that can used in a virtual CD-ROM drive or on a bootable USB-drive.

The following steps are required to create a bootable ISO file with a kickstart file and when the ISO file is booted, the kickstart file is used to install and configure the system. Creating a bootable ISO file is not a difficult task, but it is a manual procedure. The following steps are required to create a bootable ISO file with a kickstart file.

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How to minify websites with GitHub Actions

Websites are usually made up of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. These files are usually not minified, which means that they are not compressed. This means that the files are not optimized for the web. This can cause the website to load slower than it should. This is especially true for mobile users. This is where minification comes in. Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters from the files. This can include removing comments, removing whitespace, and removing unnecessary characters. This can make the website load faster and more efficiently.

Multiple ways to minify these files do exist. One way is to use a minifier online. Another way is to use a minifier locally on your computer, but both of these methods are not ideal. A more efficient way is to use a GitHub Action. This is a way to automate tasks on GitHub. This can be used to minify these files before creating an artifact and deploying this artifact to the web.

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Add issues to projects on GitHub

Adding issues to projects on GitHub is a great way to keep track of what needs to be done. This action will add issues to a project board on GitHub when they are opened or labeled. But adding issues to a project board is a manual process. The action actions/add-to-project automates the process of adding issues to a project board.

In the workflows the environment variable ADD_TO_PROJECT_URL is used to define the project board. The project board is defined by the URL of the project board. The URL can be found in the browser when the project board is opened. The URL is defined in the env section of the workflow file.

Setting the PAT for GitHub Actions

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Label and close stale issues

Issues and pull-requests are part of projects and repositories, but can also be forgotten when they grow out of control. You could search for stale issues manually once in a while, but it is another task on someone’s calendar that has been done. Like with post Add labels to GitHub pull requests this also can be automated. This way the backlog can be kept small so the team working on doesn’t have too much outstanding and untouched work.

Both GitHub App probot/stale and GitHub Action actions/stale are solutions that can be used to scan for stale issues and pull-requests, and label them or even close them. Both solutions have their benefits and drawbacks, but let’s see how they’re configured.

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Add labels to GitHub pull requests

Labels on issues and pull requests can make it easier to understand the content, but also make paying attention to what has changed and selecting them easier. If a pull request only has the label terraform for example it indicates that only infrastructure changes are in play.

While multiple GitHub Actions exist the two main solutions are Probot Autolabeler and GitHub Actions Labeler. The first solution is based on a GitHub App that must be installed and have permission to update pull requests, the second solution is based on a workflow that runs a GitHub Action.

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Create GitHub issues on a schedule

In post Custom GitHub templates for issues, the first step was made to automate the workflow more by defining issue templates on the organizational level and assigning labels when creating a new issue. A human still needs to create the issue manually while some issues must be created on a schedule to deploy new certificates or run an Ansible playbook to patch servers for example.

Like in post Start using GitHub Dependabot where merge requests were automatically created for updated dependencies, issues can also be created on a schedule. Let’s create a workflow that creates an issue every month for recurring maintenance that must be done.

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Custom GitHub templates for issues

Automating workflows reduces the need to think about them, but can also guide new people in the right direction. One of these workflows is creating issues for example. One could use the default templates provided by GitHub to create an issue for a bug or a new feature. Only default templates may not fulfill all requirements needed for a smooth workflow for a project on GitHub.

By default, GitHub has templates for issues and pull requests, but on both organization and repository levels, an override can take place. Meaning that the most specific template set will be used when creating an issue or pull request. First, we will define templates for the whole organization by creating the .github repository within the organization.

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Run Terraform within GitHub Codespaces

Using GitHub Codespaces allows you to work on your code from almost any place in the world without an Internet connection. Only the devcontainers powering Codespaces are mended to be short-lived and not contain any credentials. This may pose a challenge when you’re depending on remote services like Terraform Cloud that require an API-token to work properly.

Most devcontainers are following the Microsoft devcontainer template and those are based on Debian which gives you access to a huge repository of packaged software. Only Terraform isn’t part of the standard Debian repository, but HashiCorp provides its own repository that can be added. Let’s start by extending the Dockerfile to add the repository and install the Terraform package as highlighted below.

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Scanning with KICS for issues in Terraform

During a recent OWASP Netherlands meetup security scanners were discussed to prevent mistakes and also Checkmarx presented their tool KICS for scanning for security vulnerabilities and configuration errors in Infrastructure-as-Code. Development of KICS goes fast since late 2020 and can catch some common mistakes with known Infrastructure-as-Code definitions like Terraform, Cloudformation, and Ansible for example.

KICS can be used as a standalone scanner as it is written in Go and with GitHub Actions. For now, let’s test it with a Terraform configuration in a GitHub Workflow to see how it works and how useful it is. Maybe in the future, we will test it with Ansible and Docker as well.

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Start using GitHub Dependabot

GitHub bought a service called Dependabot a while back and is now integrating this service as a GitHub Application into the ecosystem. This allows GitHub users to automatically do dependency management and get alerted when a security-related update has been found. For a while this service was in beta but it is now enabled for all public repositories and can be enabled for private repositories as well.

Let’s start simple and create file .github/dependabot.yml in the repository with the content below will tell Dependabot to scan all your GitHub workflows daily for GitHub Actions that are defined and have a newer release available. It will also create a pull request that can be merged when approved.

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Monitoring GitHub for new releases

Big sites like GitHub or GitLab are hosting a lot of projects and have numerous of releases a day. And while you as a person can watch a repository on GitHub, you can’t filter out new releases easily. At least not easily findable in the interfaces and checking all the repositories manually because they aren’t part of a build process is too much hassle and will fail in the end. So also for me with highlight.js as it has been updated from version 9.11.0 to 9.12.0 months ago.

Looking at some solutions people were writing about on StackOverflow for example was to parse the HTML and use that as a basis for actions to be executed. A quick check and grep of the output shown that we only have links to releases, but no structured data we can easily parse.

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