What is the purpose of the updates.yml workflow?

[PhrozenByte]

First of all: Interesting project, thank you for your work and sharing it with the world ❤️

I'm currently evaluating whether Upptime might be something for me, but I'm a bit confused by the updates.yml workflow. It calls the upptime/updates@master action, which appears to be a no-op, but pulls in a lot of dependencies. What's the purpose of this workflow? The workflow itself is named "Updates CI", yet it does nothing and I don't really understand what CI updates would be necessary, considering the template is kept up to date by the update-template.yml workflow. The updates.yml workflow also isn't mentioned in the Triggers docs.

I also noticed that the Triggers docs claim other schedules: Both the update-template.yml workflow and site.yml workflow run supposedly once a week, but actually run daily by default. Why is that?

[M1XZG]

I had the same question, so I followed both workflows through to the code. Your reading is correct: as it stands today, updates.yml does not actually update anything.

The workflow checks out the repository and invokes upptime/updates@master. The current action source reads the token and SECRETS_CONTEXT, fails if no token is available, and then prints OK. It does not change files, call the GitHub API, create a commit, or dispatch another workflow. That has effectively been its implementation since 2020.

The real template synchronization is separate. update-template.yml calls upptime/uptime-monitor with command: update-template. So disabling the Updates CI workflow should not stop template updates. Deleting the file by hand is less useful because the template synchronizer may put it back; disabling the workflow in GitHub's Actions UI would avoid that loop.

The schedule discrepancy looks real too. In the current generated template, update-template.yml runs at 0 0 * * *, site.yml at 0 1 * * *, and updates.yml at 0 3 * * *. Those are all daily schedules. The comments saying “by default, weekly” and any documentation saying the same appear to be stale.

My best guess is that upptime/updates was intended as a channel for update notices or migrations and was never developed beyond its initial stub, but I could not find any current behaviour that happens merely by invoking it. A maintainer may know whether it is being kept as a compatibility hook for something planned. For someone evaluating the project today, though, I think the practical answer is: update-template.yml performs the updates; updates.yml currently only consumes a runner invocation and verifies that a token exists.