How to enable GitHub Actions on your Profile README for a snake-eating contribution graph 🐍

Lots of people have been talking about and sharing their GitHub Profile READMEs. It was a project we launched last year and developers are loving it. As this feature became more popular, more developers were building templates, plugins, and apps for you to use on your profile.

This post from Supritha caught my attention. I like the way they talk about various pieces of code to have on your GitHub Profile README.

How to have an awesome GitHub profile ?

Supritha ・ Jun 8 '21

#github #markdown #opensource #git

One of the comments from Guillaume Falourd pointed to a really cool project from Platane.

Platane / snk

🟩⬜ Generates a snake game from a github user contributions graph and output a screen capture as animated svg or gif

snk

Generates a snake game from a github user contributions graph

Pull a github user's contribution graph Make it a snake Game, generate a snake path where the cells get eaten in an orderly fashion.

Generate a gif or svg image.

Available as github action. It can automatically generate a new image each day. Which makes for great github profile readme

Usage

github action

- uses: Platane/snk@v3
  with
    # github user name to read the contribution graph from (**required**)
    # using action context var `github.repository_owner` or specified user
    github_user_name: ${{ github.repository_owner }}

    # list of files to generate.
    # one file per line. Each output can be customized with options as query string.
    #
    #  supported options:
    #  - palette:     A preset of color, one of [github, github-dark, github-light]
    #  - color_snake: Color of the snake
    #  - color_dots:  Coma separated list of dots color.
    #                 The

…

View on GitHub

It uses GitHub Actions to build and update a user's contribution graph, and then has a snake eat all your contributions. The output generates a gif file, that you can then show on your GitHub Profile README. I thought this was pretty cool, so I set about adding this to my profile.

Step 1. Setting up GitHub Actions

The first thing you want to ensure before you start this project, is that you have GitHub Actions setup. Head to your Profile and ensure the "Actions" tab is available. Everyone should now have this feature.

Next, head to Platane's Action (available on the Marketplace) and make a copy of the code. You'll need to add this snippet into your Actions file.

Step 2. Creating your GitHub Actions yaml file

This is definitely the part where I got stuck. When looking at the code, I wasn't sure exactly where to add the lines of code mentioned on Marketplace.

After looking at the way Platane had their Actions file setup, I was able to generate the code (with a little help from Bdougie of course).

I've added the full code snippet below and added plenty of comments to (hopefully make it easy to understand).

You can copy this code straight into a blank *.yml file. Make sure you create a new *.yml file under the following directory:

YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME --> .github --> workflows --> FILE_NAME.yml

  
  
  GitHub Action for generating a contribution graph with a snake eating your contributions.


name: Generate Snake

  
  
  Controls when the action will run. This action runs every 6 hours.


on:

  schedule:

      # every 6 hours

    - cron: "0 */6 * * *"

  
  
  This command allows us to run the Action automatically from the Actions tab.


workflow_dispatch:

  
  
  The sequence of runs in this workflow:


jobs:

  # This workflow contains a single job called "build"

  build:

    # The type of runner that the job will run on

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

# Steps represent a sequence of tasks that will be executed as part of the job
steps:

# Checks repo under $GITHUB_WORKSHOP, so your job can access it
  - uses: actions/checkout@v2

# Generates the snake  
  - uses: Platane/snk@master
    id: snake-gif
    with:
      github_user_name: mishmanners
      # these next 2 lines generate the files on a branch called "output". This keeps the main branch from cluttering up.
      gif_out_path: dist/github-contribution-grid-snake.gif
      svg_out_path: dist/github-contribution-grid-snake.svg

 # show the status of the build. Makes it easier for debugging (if there's any issues).
  - run: git status

  # Push the changes
  - name: Push changes
    uses: ad-m/github-push-action@master
    with:
      github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
      branch: master
      force: true

  - uses: crazy-max/ghaction-github-pages@v2.1.3
    with:
      # the output branch we mentioned above
      target_branch: output
      build_dir: dist
    env:
      GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}



    

    

Step 3. Running GitHub Actions

Once you've added the code above and committed it, head to your Actions tab. Under "Workflows", you should see the "Generate Snake" Action you created above.

Click "Run Workflow" and watch your workflow run. You can even expand your workflow and see what's happening in real time.

Once your workflow has finished running, you should have received a green ✅ "build" checkmark. If so, this means your Action is working nicely. If not, you'll have to go through the code and see where the errors are. The "build" status should give you some indication of where your errors lie. You can also compare it with the yaml file on my GitHub Profile README.

If you have the green "build" ✅ then you should be good to go. Head back to your repo's "Code" directory, and change your branch to "output". Here you'll find the two versions of your contribution graph with the snake eating it: a *.gif and a *.svg. The good thing about these files is the file is rewritten over itself every time the Action runs. Thus, your contribution graph will always be up to date.

Step 4. Adding a contribution-eating snake to your profile

Now the final set is to add this to your profile. Grab the file location of your *.gif. It should be something like:

https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_USERNAME/blob/output/github-contribution-grid-snake.gif

Add this to your profile by copying the file location onto a new line in your markdown file:

![snake gif](https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_USERNAME/blob/output/github-contribution-grid-snake.gif)

Now you should have a really cool looking snake eating your contributions!

Hopefully this guide was helpful for you and gives you a good base to start building and adding more Actions on your profile. What have you been adding to your GitHub Profile README? Other there other cool Actions I should be looking at?

Comments

[Platane]

Hi, First of all thanks for the precise tutorial!

There were a few changes in the action (mostly to adapt to github api), I had to change some parameters and bump the version.

Unfortunately a lot of people use the edge version ( with the tag #master ). It's a bit of a mess but the result is that this version is deprecated and can no longer work without adding some modification from the user (adding a github token as param)

The recommended usage is now this declaration:

- uses: Platane/snk/svg-only@v3
  with:
    github_user_name: ${{ github.repository_owner }}
    outputs: |
      dist/github-snake.svg

Check the readme for details about the new options

[Mohit Arora]

Finally something worked :D

[Michelle Duke]

Thanks for putting this together ❤️

[KushalTanna24]

Work fine.! Here is mine - KushalTanna24

[seamy]

Thanks Michelle Mannering for your (dev.to/mishmanners/how-to-enable-g...) topic.

If other users wish to utilize this, kindly modify this topic;

1-Use this (thanks Platane github.com/Platane) file;

github.com/1SeaMy/1SeaMy/blob/main...

2-Use this;

![snake gif](https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_USERNAME/blob/output/github-contribution-grid-snake-dark.svg)

or this

![snake gif](https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_USERNAME/blob/output/github-contribution-grid-snake.svg)


[Michael jentsch]

Great tutorial! Works for me.
Here's mine - github.com/msoftware

[Gustavo Martins]

Awsome! How did you change the background-color?

[Michelle Duke]

I didn't change the background colour. It's a .png/.svg image, meaning the background is transparent. It looks dark on mine because I have dark mode enabled on GitHub. You can enable it by clicking Settings --> Appearance --> choosing your mode.

[Gustavo Martins]

Thank you! actually I was using the .gif version, so I switched to the .svg one and voilá

[Michelle Duke]

Awesome! Glad to be of help 😄

[L3on06]

Hello everyone, before proceeding, please navigate to 'Settings -> Actions -> General -> Workflow Permissions' in your README.md file and select 'Read and Write' permissions. This is important because if you have other permissions selected, it may result in errors.

[Unknown]

I specially created account to say thank you I almost wasted my 3 hours in wandering around to fix issue and you saved my life.** Thank you**

[BAayah]

Thank you so much! I tried to change in settings 'Contribution' to 'include my private contributions' but anyway my Readme profile doesn't show My Contributions. Could you please help me with this?
github.com/BAayah/BAayah

[Jakob]

Getting this error when I try to run workflow and after it fails:
Node.js 12 actions are deprecated. Please update the following actions to use Node.js 16: actions/checkout@v2. For more information see: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-09-22-github-actions-all-actions-will-begin-running-on-node16-instead-of-node12/.


[Shuvajit]

go to setting -> action -> and check the workflow as read and write
(run build again) hopefully you will not get error

[Ariafatah]

github.com/ariafatah0711/ariafatah...

Check my github and change this file because I tried the file above only as much as it appears if you want to use the full one I use. And don't forget to give stars😁

[Ariafatah]

If the action fails, you can go to repo settings, click action, then select general, and look at the bottom where it says read and write.

[Bhumesh Polaswar]

Great worked for me. See github.com/bpolaswar
Thanks.

[Hoàng Anh Tiến]

It does not work for me. Can someone help me?
github.com/hoangtien2k3qx1

Error:
actions/checkout@v2, platane/snk@master, ad-m/github-push-action@master, and crazy-max/ghaction-github-pages@v2.1.3 are not allowed to be used in hoangtien2k3qx1/hoangtien2k3qx1. Actions in this workflow must be: within a repository owned by hoangtien2k3qx1.