devto-publish-action

A Github Action to upload your writing to dev.to.

It supports creating new articles, or updating existing articles.

To support updating existing articles, a simple json file is required. The suggested workflow below shows how to automatically keep this state file up to date from your publishing process.

Inputs

directory

Required A directory path containing the markdown posts you would like to sync.

api-key

Required Your Dev.to API Key. see dev.to api docs for instructions on creating an API Key.

state-file

Optional the name of a file to preserve the mapping of file name to dev.to article number. The default value is ids.json. In order to support updating existing articles, this file must be updated when new articles are published. See the Example Workflow below for a way to achieve this.

Outputs

None.

Example Action Usage

- name: Publish to Dev.to
    uses: muncus/devto-publish-action@release/v1
    with:
    directory: "$GITHUB_WORKSPACE/dev.to/"
    api-key: "${{ secrets.DEVTO_TOKEN }}"
    state-file: "$GITHUB_WORKSPACE/ids.json"

Note that this example uses a [github secret] to store the dev.to api key.

Example Workflow

Because updating articles depends on knowing the existing Article ID number (a requirement of the dev.to api), it is necessary to preserve changes in our state file. To do this, I use the peter-evans/create-pull-request action.

    - name: Publish to Dev.to
      uses: muncus/devto-publish-action@release/v1
      with:
        directory: "$GITHUB_WORKSPACE/dev.to/"
        api-key: "${{ secrets.DEVTO_API_TOKEN }}"
        state-file: "$GITHUB_WORKSPACE/ids.json"

    - name: Create PR to update state file
      uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v3
      with:
        title: "[CI] Update state file with published article ids"
        reviewers: ${{ github.actor }}
        token: "${{ GITHUB_CREDENTIALS }}"
        base: master
        branch: "ci/state-file-update

This excerpt from my workflow creates a Pull Request whenever the state file is updated. PRs are always based from the master branch, and will be assigned to the user whose push triggered the action.

The token field must be filled in with a valid github auth token, whether that's a Personal Access Token for yourself, or a dedicated automation user's Access Token, is up to you.