Updating website content on schedule via GitHub Actions

I would like to share my journey on building a self-sustainable content management system that does not require a content database in a traditional sense.

The Problem

The content (blog posts and bookmarks) of this website is stored in a Notion database:

The database with bookmarks –  Notion UI

The problem that I was trying to solve was to not have to deploy the website manually after each bookmark that I add there. And on top of that – keep the hosting as cheap as possible, because for me it does not really matter how fast the bookmarks that I add to my Notion database end up online.

So, after some research I came up with the following setup:

A high-level overview of the content delivery mechanism

The system consists of several components:

• The “Push to Main” action that deploys the changes
• The “Update Content” action that downloads content from Notion API and commits the changes
• The “Update Content on Schedule” action runs once in a while and triggers the “Update Content” action

Let us look into each one of them from the inside out in detail.

The “Push to Main” Workflow

There is not a lot to say here, pretty standard setup, – when there is a push to the main branch, this workflow builds the app and deploys it to Cloudflare Pages using the Wrangler CLI:

name: Push to Main
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  workflow_dispatch: {}
jobs:
  deploy-cloudflare-pages:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 5
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Setup pnpm
        uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
      - name: Setup Node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version-file: .node-version
          cache: pnpm
      - name: Install node modules
        run: |
          pnpm --version
          pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
      - name: Build the App
        run: |
          pnpm build
      - name: Publish Cloudflare Pages
        env:
          CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID: ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID }}
          CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          pnpm wrangler pages deploy ./out --project-name ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_PROJECT_NAME }}

The “Update Content” Workflow

This Workflow can only be triggered “manually”… but also automatically because you can trigger it using a GitHub Personal Access Token, a.k.a. PAT. I initially wrote it because I wanted to deploy changes from my phone. It downloads the posts and bookmarks using the Notion API and then – if there are any change to the codebase – creates a commit and pushes it. In order to function properly, this workflow must be provided with a PAT that has “Read and Write access to code” of the repository:

name: Update Content
on:
  workflow_dispatch: {}
jobs:
  download-content:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 5
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          # A Github Personal Access Token with access to the repository 
          # that has the follwing permissions:
          # ✅ Read and Write access to code
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_PAT_CONTENT }}
      - name: Setup pnpm
        uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
      - name: Setup Node
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version-file: .node-version
          cache: pnpm
      - name: Install node modules
        run: |
          pnpm --version
          pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
      - name: Download articles content from Notion
        env:
          NOTION_KEY: "${{ secrets.NOTION_KEY }}"
          NOTION_ARTICLES_DATABASE_ID: "${{ secrets.NOTION_ARTICLES_DATABASE_ID }}"
        run: |
          pnpm download-articles
      - name: Download bookmarks content from Notion
        env:
          NOTION_KEY: ${{ secrets.NOTION_KEY }}
          NOTION_BOOKMARKS_DATABASE_ID: ${{ secrets.NOTION_BOOKMARKS_DATABASE_ID }}
        run: |
          pnpm download-bookmarks
      - name: Configure Git
        run: |
          git config --global user.email "${{ secrets.GIT_USER_EMAIL }}"
          git config --global user.name "${{ secrets.GIT_USER_NAME }}"
      - name: Check if anything changed
        id: check-changes
        run: |
          if [ -n "$(git status --porcelain)" ]; then
            echo "There are changes"
            echo "HAS_CHANGED=true" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          else
            echo "There are no changes"
            echo "HAS_CHANGED=false" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
          fi
      - name: Commit changes
        if: steps.check-changes.outputs.HAS_CHANGED == 'true'
        run: |
          git add ./src/content
          git add ./public
          git commit -m "Automatic content update commit"
          git push

The “Update Content on Schedule” Workflow

This one is pretty simple: it just runs every once in a while and triggers the workflow above. In order to function properly, this workflow must be provided with a GitHub PAT that has “Read and Write access to actions” of the repository. In my case it’s a different PAT:

name: Update Content on Schedule
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "13 0,12 * * *"
  workflow_dispatch: {}
jobs:
  trigger-update-content:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 5
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Dispatch the Update Content workflow
        env:
          # A Github Personal Access Token with access to the repository 
          # that has the follwing permissions:
          # ✅ Read and Write access to actions
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_PAT_ACTIONS }}
        run: |
          gh workflow run "Update Content" --ref main

Conclusion

For me this setup has proven to be really good and flexible. Because of the modular structure, the “Update Content” action can be triggered manually – e.g. from my phone while travelling. To me this was another valuable experience of progressive enhancement of a workflow.

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