How to prevent GitHub from suspending your cronjob based triggers

I created a GitHub action to prevent GitHub from suspending your cronjob based action triggers due to repository inactivity.

gautamkrishnar / keepalive-workflow

GitHub action to prevent GitHub from suspending your cronjob based triggers due to repository inactivity

Keepalive Workflow

GitHub action to prevent GitHub from suspending your cronjob based triggers due to repository inactivity

Why

GitHub will suspend the scheduled trigger for GitHub action workflows if there is no commit in the repository for the past 60 days. The cron based triggers won't run unless a new commit is made. It shows the message "This scheduled workflow is disabled because there hasn't been activity in this repository for at least 60 days" under the cronjob triggered action.

What

This workflow will automatically use the GitHub API (or create a dummy commit) in your repo if the last commit in your repo is 45 days (default) ago. This will keep the cronjob trigger active so that it will run indefinitely without getting suspended by GitHub for inactivity.

How to use

There are three ways you can consume this library in your GitHub actions

GitHub API Keepalive Workflow -

…

View on GitHub

Why

GitHub will suspend the scheduled trigger for GitHub action workflows if there is no commit in the repository for the past 60 days. The cron based triggers won't run unless a new commit is made. It shows the message "This scheduled workflow is disabled because there hasn't been activity in this repository for at least 60 days" under the cronjob triggered action.

What

This workflow will automatically create a dummy commit in your repo if the last commit in your repo is 50 days (default) ago.
This will keep the cronjob trigger active so that it will run indefinitely without getting suspended by GitHub for inactivity.

How to use

There are two ways you can consume this library in your GitHub actions

Via GitHub Actions (For GitHub Actions users)

You can just include the library as a step after one of your favorite GitHub actions. Your workflow file should have the checkout action defined in one of your steps since this library needs git CLI to work.

name: Github Action with a cronjob trigger
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 * * *"

jobs:
  cronjob-based-github-action:
    name: Cronjob based github action
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - # step1
      - # step 2
      - # step n, use it as the last step
      - uses: gautamkrishnar/keepalive-workflow@master # using the workflow with default settings

Let's take an example of Waka Readme

name: My awesome readme
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    # Runs at 12 am UTC
    - cron: "0 0 * * *"

jobs:
  update-readme:
    name: Update this repo's README
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: athul/waka-readme@master
        with:
          WAKATIME_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.WAKATIME_API_KEY }}
      - uses: gautamkrishnar/keepalive-workflow@master # using the workflow with default settings

Via JavaScript library (For GitHub Actions developers)

For developers making awesome GitHub actions, you can consume the library in your javascript-based GitHub action by installing it from NPM. Make sure that your GitHub action uses checkout action since this library needs it as a dependency.
You can also ask your users to include it as an additional step as mentioned in the first part.

Install the package

Install via NPM:

npm i keepalive-workflow

Install via Yarn:

yarn add keepalive-workflow

Use it in your own GitHub action source code

const core = require('@actions/core');
const { KeepAliveWorkflow } = require('keepalive-workflow');

// Using the lib
KeepAliveWorkflow(githubToken, committerUsername, committerEmail, commitMessage, timeElapsed)
  .then((message) => {
    core.info(message);
    process.exit(0);
  })
  .catch((error) => {
    core.error(error);
    process.exit(1);
  });

Options

For GitHub Action

If you use the workflow as mentioned via GitHub actions following are the options available to you to customize its behavior.

Option	Default Value	Description	Required
gh_token	your default GitHub token with repo scope	GitHub access token with Repo scope	No
commit_message	Automated commit by Keepalive Workflow to keep the repository active	Commit message used while committing to the repo	No
committer_username	gkr-bot	Username used while committing to the repo	No
committer_username	[e-mail]	Email id used while committing to the repo	No
time_elapsed	50	Time elapsed from the previous commit to trigger a new automated commit (in days)	No

For Javascript Library

If you are using the JS Library version of the project, please consult the function's DocString in library.js to see the list of available parameters.

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