How To Automate Tedious Tasks With GitHub Actions

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Howdy folks,

Today’s tutorial is a quick look at how I use GitHub Actions to automatically run scripts on a schedule. It’s a powerful (and free) tool that lets you automate the boring stuff, so you can spend more time on the work that actually matters.

There are a million ways to use GitHub Actions, but the main thing I use them for is setting up simple data pipelines that scrape and save data on a regular schedule. This is useful when you’re working with a data source that updates constantly and older versions of the data can’t easily be accessed.

For instance, NBA MVP Odds.

Odds change by the day and if you want to track them over time than you’ll need some kind of system that regularly pulls in the latest data and saves it somewhere.

You could sit down at your computer and run a script at the same time every day and store the data on your local computer. Or you could use GitHub Actions and spend your time doing literally anything else.

I used GitHub Actions all last season to pull in the MVP odds daily just so that I could create this dumb gif at the end of the season.

I’ll walk you through a simple example of setting up a GitHub Action, which should give you a sense for how you can incorporate them into your workflows.

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How To Use GitHub Actions

This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of Git/GitHub. By that I mean you already have a GitHub account, know what a repository is, and understand how to commit changes, etc…