I Built My Own CI/CD, and the Interesting Part Wasn't the CI
On replacing GitHub Actions with something that owns almost nothing — and why that turned out to be the whole point.
ci/cd
19 posts tagged “ci/cd”.
- 2026
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21 min read
- 2025
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Automatically maintaining Homebrew formulas using GitHub Actions
I previously wrote about Packaging a Python CLI tool for Homebrew. I've now figured out a pattern for automatically updating those formulas over time, using GitHub Actions.
3 min read -
actions/setup-python caching for setup.py projects
I used to use a combination of and in all of my Python GitHub Actions projects in order to install Python dependencies via a cache, rather than hitting PyPI to download copies every time.
1 min read -
Auto-formatting YAML files with yamlfmt
I decided to see if there was an equivalent of Black or Prettier for YAML files. I found yamlfmt from Google. Update : It turns out Prettier can format YAML too.
2 min read -
Bundling Python inside an Electron app
I used python-build-standalone for this, which provides a version of Python that is designed for easy of bundling - it's also used by PyOxidize.
1 min read -
Format code examples in documentation with blacken-docs
I decided to enforce that all code examples in the Datasette documentation be formatted using Black. Here's issue 1718 where I researched the options for doing this. I found the blacken-docs tool.
1 min read -
Ensure labels exist in a GitHub repository
I wanted to ensure that when this template repository was used to create a new repo that repo would have a specific set of labels.
1 min read - 2024
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Adding Sphinx autodoc to a project, and configuring Read The Docs to build it
I built a new API reference page today for , using the Sphinx autodoc extension to extract docstrings from the code and use them to build a full class reference.
3 min read -
Attaching a generated file to a GitHub release using Actions
For Datasette Desktop I wanted to run an action which, when I created a release, would build an asset for that release and then upload and attach it.
1 min read -
Conditionally running a second job in a GitHub Actions workflow
My simonwillisonblog-backup workflow periodically creates a JSON backup of my blog's PostgreSQL database, using db-to-sqlite and sqlite-diffable.
1 min read -
Configuring Dependabot for a Python project
GitHub's Dependabot can automatically file PRs with bumps to dependencies when new versions of them are available.
1 min read - 2023
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Commit a file if it changed
This recipe runs a Python script to update a README, then commits it back to the parent repo but only if it has changed: My first attempt threw an error if I tried o run and the README had not…
1 min read -
Check spelling using codespell
Today I discovered codespell via this Rich commit. is a really simple spell checker that can be run locally or incorporated into a CI flow. codespell is designed to run against source code.
1 min read -
Building and deploying a custom site using GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages
I figured out a minimal pattern for building a completely custom website using GitHub Actions and deploying the result to GitHub Pages. First you need to enable GitHub Pages for the repository.
1 min read -
Building Mastodon bots with GitHub Actions and toot
Twitter announced today that they'll be ending free API access for bots. My @covidsewage Twitter bot posts a screenshot of the latest Covid sewage data for parts of the San Francisco Bay Area every…
2 min read -
GitHub Actions job summaries
New feature announced here. Here's the full documentation. These are incredibly easy to use. GitHub creates a file in your workspace and puts the filename in , so you can build the summary markdown…
1 min read -
Creating GitHub repository labels with an Actions workflow
Newly created GitHub repositories come with a default set of labels. I have several labels I like to add on top of these.
2 min read -
Code coverage using pytest and codecov.io
I got my asgi-csrf Python package up to 100% code coverage. Here's the pull request. I started by installing and using the pytest-cov pytest plugin.
1 min read -
Dump out all GitHub Actions context
Useful for seeing what's available for conditions (see context and expression syntax). I copied this example action from here and deployed it here. Here's an example run.
1 min read