标签：#githubactions

Have you ever stopped to think about the risk of having a pipeline where any merge into the main branch deploys straight to production without a single safety gate? For a long time, our workflow here was that classic setup almost every developer has used at some point: merge on main triggering an SSH script with git pull and pm2 restart It worked for day-to-day tasks, but it gave a false sense of stability lol The reality check hit when I found a critical blind spot in the automation: remote SSH scripts were running without strict error handling. In other words, if a git pull caused a conflict or a database migration failed halfway through, the script simply ignored the failure, ran to the end, and GitHub Actions marked the pipeline as green The absolute worst-case scenario for monitoring: the pipeline reported that everything went smoothly, while production was already completely down On top of that, the execution order was inverted: database migrations were running before the application build. If TypeScript threw a type error right after, the database schema had already advanced while the new code never booted. And since Prisma has no native down migrations, rolling back meant a high-risk manual intervention I decided to stop everything and redesign our delivery pipeline from scratch, starting from one clear premise: a tag is a release, a merge is not Today, nothing touches the production server without an annotated SemVer tag, going through 6 tightly coupled stages: Strict tag validation: only accepts annotated tags matching vX.Y.Z, ensuring author, timestamp, and audit trail for every single release Quality gates across PR and Release: automated tests with Vitest, strict typechecking, builds, and migration validation against a clean database via workflow_call Decoupled backups: an independent daily scheduled routine combined with a mandatory safety snapshot right before touching production Real migration dry-run: the most valuable gate, where the pipeline resto

The warning landed on the only people who had done it properly I maintain a linter that reads agent config files — SKILL.md , AGENTS.md , CLAUDE.md — and fails CI when they bake in something that only works on the author's machine. One of its rules says: if you call an external CLI, declare it, or the next person won't have it. Declaring it means naming it in frontmatter: requires : codex Except that anyone with more than one dependency writes the list form, because that's what YAML is for: requires : - codex - gemini My implementation only read the first shape. So the block list — the normal way, the way you write it the moment you have two of anything — was invisible to the linter, and it warned you for an undeclared CLI that you had, in fact, declared. Read that back slowly. Authors who ignored the dependency question entirely were never flagged, because they never wrote a requires: key at all. Authors who sat down and wrote the contract properly got a warning telling them they hadn't. The rule was inverted with respect to the thing it was trying to encourage. I shipped that. It went out in a patch release, and I only found it because a commenter used the phrase "dependency contract" and I went to re-read my own implementation of it. Then it happened again. Twice, in one release Two comments on a post of mine turned into new rules. One of them, unverified-write , reports a file that changes external state — git push , npm publish , an INSERT — and never reads that state back anywhere. Before publishing, I ran it over 586 real skill files pulled from a public registry, found two false-positive shapes in the data, fixed both, and re-measured. Fire rate 0.7%, and every hit I could check by hand was genuine. I felt good about it. Then I handed the diff to a different model for a pre-publish read, and it produced this input in about a minute: Never run `git push --force` from this skill. That is a git push in a code span, in a file with no read-back anywhere. My rule

I manage the YouTube longform queue for my BuilderStack channel as JSON files in content/yt-longform-queue/ . A spec file lands there when a generator script commits a new dialogue; the publish workflow picks the file, renders it to MP4, uploads it, then moves the file to uploaded/ . No external queue service, no database rows, no management dashboard. This has worked for three months without a major incident. Four patterns kept it from collapsing. Archetype-priority picking, not FIFO First-in, first-out publishing breaks when you have product walkthrough videos, educational deep-dives, and weekly recap specs all in the queue simultaneously. A recap spec committed yesterday would block a product walkthrough from two weeks ago if the queue ran FIFO — and the product content is what actually grows the channel. The picker uses an explicit priority rank: RANK = { " product_findindiegame " : 0 , " product_ossfind " : 1 , " hidden-gem " : 1 , " build_in_public " : 2 , " technical " : 3 , " curated " : 4 , " meta " : 4 , " contrarian " : 6 , " recap " : 7 , " ai_tools " : 7 , } DEFAULT_RANK = 5 Archetypes not in the dict fall to DEFAULT_RANK = 5 — the middle, not the bottom. New formats I haven't classified yet still air rather than sitting perpetually at the end. Within each rank tier, files sort by filename (oldest-first). The archetype value comes from the spec JSON's top-level archetype field, falling back to a prefix match on the filename for older files that predate the field. One consequence: adding a new archetype name to the dict can reorder the queue overnight. I've done this intentionally to let a backlogged product video jump ahead of a stale recap. 21-day stale expiry Queue files include a date prefix: YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.json . The picker removes files whose date is more than 21 days old before selecting what to publish: MAX_AGE_DAYS = " ${ QUEUE_MAX_AGE_DAYS :- 21 } " CUTOFF = $( date -u -d " ${ MAX_AGE_DAYS } days ago" +%Y-%m-%d ) for f in content/yt-longform

A GitHub product launch is being held back by the CI/CD platform underneath it. On August 6 GitHub filed a Changelog entry announcing that Kimi K3, an open-weight model, is now generally available in GitHub Copilot, then added an editor's note the same day: the rollout is temporarily paused while GitHub mitigates an incident with GitHub Actions. What the entry says, and what it does not Per the note, GitHub will resume the rollout as soon as possible and update the docs with Kimi K3 pricing: $3 per 1M input tokens, $15 per 1M output tokens, and $0.30 per 1M cached input tokens. That is the extent of the disclosure. The Changelog does not describe the Actions incident, does not put a scale on its blast radius, and does not commit to a resume time. It also does not explain how a Copilot model rollout ends up gated on Actions in the first place; a reader can infer that some provisioning or feature-flag step rides the same platform, but the entry does not say so. Availability is qualified in a way worth flagging. Kimi K3 is GA on paper, but the switch that actually turns it on for end users is paused. The operational read There is a coupling here worth naming plainly. GitHub sells Actions as CI/CD for everyone else, and it also uses Actions to ship its own products. When Actions has a bad day, GitHub's launch calendar has a bad day too, in public. That is not a scandal; it is what dogfooding looks like when the changelog is a live document. It is also a data point for any team running a rollout on top of a hosted CI platform: your feature-flag flip is downstream of somebody else's incident queue, and you inherit that queue's MTTR whether or not it is on your status page. Two follow-ups are worth watching. First, whether the resumed rollout entry names the incident and its cause, or whether it stays silent. Second, whether Kimi K3's published pricing survives the pause unchanged. Until then, the GA label is doing work the runtime cannot back up.

When I first started contributing to open source, GitHub Actions felt like a black box. Seeing a failed workflow on my pull requests was intimidating because I didn't really understand what was happening behind the scenes. Well, this month, I decided to change that. What I Worked On I implemented GitHub Actions across three of my project repos. My main focus was: Adding Markdownlint for Markdown quality Adding Pylint for Python linting. Updating documentation while integrating CI. What I Learned The biggest lesson wasn't technical — it was changing my mindset. A failed workflow isn't something to fear. It's simple feedback. Whether it's markdownlint warning or a pylint error, each failure helps improve the project. Looking Ahead Most of this month was spent improving my own projects, so I didn't contribute much to external repositories. Next month, I want to build on this foundation by contributing to more open source projects and applying what I've learned. Sometimes, learning the tools behind open source is just as valuable as making another pull request. I'm curious What part of GitHub Actions or CI/CD was the most challenging when you first started? Or If you are just getting started, what's the biggest thing that's still a mystery to you? I'd love to hear your experience and tips in the comments. Transparency Note: I used AI as an editor—not as the author. For this article, it helped refine the structure and improve the English grammar. The technical content, experiments, opinions, and conclusions are my own and were reviewed by me before publishing.

🦄 I shipped a linter that fails your commit if you won't admit AI touched the code, and then did the most predictable thing possible—let nine months of the data sit there untouched while I busied myself with other things. Then I actually looked at it: nine months of footers piled up in git log like a lonely change jar. Every one of them said how much of those commits were mine, but I hadn't ever sat down and actually counted the jar. So I built the thing to count it. 🪙 The Jar Nobody Counted 🫙 Nine months of commits, every single one carrying a footer that states how much of it I actually wrote, and I could not have told you the number—not roughly or even within twenty points. It was all sitting in git log , structured, and enforced on every commit by a hook I built specifically for that purpose. But it was completely inert. Dropping change in a jar isn't the same as knowing how much money is in it. rai-lint will block your commit until you write the footer, but then it's done—the pile just sits there, and I never built the thing that adds it up. anchildress1 / rai-lint Dual-language linter for Responsible AI commit footers — shared logic for Node (commitlint) and Python (gitlint). Stop playing hide-and-seek with AI in your commits. A dual-language validation framework that makes AI attribution non-negotiable. 📊 Project Stats 🗣️ Languages 📦 Packages 🤖 AI & Automation 🔧 Quality & Standards Installation • Quick Start • Required Commit Footers • Documentation What is this? 🤖 RAI Lint enforces Responsible AI (RAI) attribution in every commit. No more "who wrote this?" moments. No more mystery code. Just honest, trackable AI contributions. Read the full story: Did AI Erase Attribution? Your Git History Is Missing a Co-Author %%{init: {'theme':'dark'}}%% flowchart LR A[Developer Commits] --> B{Has AI Footer?} B -->|Yes| C[Commit Accepted ✅] B -->|No| D[Commit Rejected ❌] C --> E[Clear AI Attribution] D --> F[Add Footer & Retry] Loading Why does this exist? Because transpa

Six failed CI runs. Thirty-six hours of GitHub Actions time. Every run timing out at exactly the 6-hour limit. The culprit was one line in tests/setup.js . The Setup We were building a multi-tenant platform with a PostgreSQL backend — around 76 database models handling everything from user accounts and billing to visitor logs and real-time notifications. The test suite had grown to roughly 1,140 test cases across 36 files. Standard stuff. CI ran on every PR. Tests passed locally. And then one day, CI just... never finished. The Anti-Pattern Here's what the test setup looked like: // tests/setup.js beforeEach ( async () => { const tableNames = await getTableNames (); // 76 tables await sequelize . query ( `TRUNCATE TABLE ${ tableNames . join ( ' , ' )} CASCADE;` ); }); The intent was clean isolation — every test starts with a blank slate. Reasonable in theory. Catastrophic in practice. The Math Do the multiplication: 76 tables × 1,140 tests = 86,640 TRUNCATE operations Each TRUNCATE TABLE ... CASCADE is not a cheap operation. PostgreSQL has to: Acquire exclusive locks on all referenced tables Walk the foreign key graph to find dependent tables Truncate each in dependency order Release locks With a moderately complex schema where most tables reference others (users → societies → members → invoices → payments → ...), a single TRUNCATE ... CASCADE on a central table can fan out into dozens of implicit truncations. Multiply that by 86,640 and you have a test suite that will never complete within any reasonable timeout. Why It Wasn't Caught Sooner Two reasons: 1. It used to be fast. When the suite had 50 tests and 20 tables, this pattern worked fine. 50 × 20 = 1,000 truncations — uncomfortable but survivable. Nobody noticed when the suite crossed a tipping point. 2. Local runs used a different database state. Locally, developers often ran a subset of tests with --grep or file-specific runs. The full suite was only ever run on CI, and CI was slow enough that most assumed i

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make when learning Terraform is treating their local machine as the deployment server. A typical workflow looks like this: terraform init terraform plan terraform apply While this approach is perfectly fine for learning, it quickly becomes problematic when working on real-world projects with multiple engineers. Consider these questions: Who deployed the infrastructure? Was the infrastructure reviewed before deployment? Can someone else reproduce the deployment? What happens if the engineer's laptop is lost or misconfigured? How do we know exactly what changed? These are some of the reasons Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is almost always integrated with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines in professional environments. In this article, we'll build a simple Terraform CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions. Instead of focusing only on the YAML syntax, we'll first understand why each stage exists and how they work together to produce safe, repeatable infrastructure deployments. What is Terraform CI/CD? Terraform CI/CD is the process of automating the validation, planning, and deployment of infrastructure whenever changes are made to Terraform code. Instead of running Terraform commands manually from a developer's laptop, a CI/CD platform executes those commands automatically in a controlled environment. The workflow typically looks like this: Developer │ ▼ Git Push │ ▼ GitHub Repository │ ▼ GitHub Actions │ ▼ Terraform Init │ ▼ Terraform Validate │ ▼ Terraform Plan │ ▼ Manual Approval │ ▼ Terraform Apply │ ▼ AWS Infrastructure This approach provides consistency, visibility, and security while reducing the chances of human error. Why Not Run Terraform Manually? Running Terraform from your laptop works well for personal projects, but it introduces several risks in a team environment. Manual Deployment CI/CD Deployment Requires someone to remember every command Runs automatically Easy to skip validation Validat

Documentation is often the last thing developers think about—until a broken link frustrates users or a README sends someone to a 404 page. I wanted a simple way to automatically verify links in Markdown documentation during CI, so I built urldn-link-check. It's an open-source GitHub Action and CLI that scans your documentation and reports issues before they're merged. Features ✅ Detect broken links (404/500) ↪️ Detect redirect chains 🔒 Detect insecure HTTP links 📏 Find overly long URLs 📄 Scan Markdown & MDX files ⚡ Fast concurrent scanning 💬 GitHub PR summaries 📊 JSON & Markdown reports Installation npm install -D urldn-link-check or npx urldn-link-check . GitHub Action uses: urldn/link-check@v1 That's it. Every push or pull request can automatically verify your documentation. Why I Built It While maintaining documentation, I noticed that broken links often go unnoticed until someone reports them. Instead of checking them manually, I wanted a lightweight tool that integrates directly into GitHub Actions and fits naturally into a CI workflow. Open Source The project is MIT licensed and contributions are welcome. ⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/urldn/link-check 📦 npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/urldn-link-check https://www.npmjs.com/package/urldn-link-check This is the first developer tool in the URLDN ecosystem, with more open-source projects planned in the future. If you have ideas or feedback, I'd love to hear them.

I built Commit Cron , a small GitHub Actions experiment that creates one automated commit every day. The project updates a text file with the latest execution time, commits the change using the github-actions[bot] account, and pushes it back to the repository. View the project on GitHub: Commit Cron How It Works The workflow runs every day at 10:00 AM Asia/Manila time. on : schedule : - cron : " 0 10 * * *" timezone : " Asia/Manila" workflow_dispatch : The workflow_dispatch trigger also lets me run the workflow manually from the GitHub Actions tab. The workflow checks out the repository, creates the bot directory when needed, and updates bot/last-run.txt : mkdir -p bot printf "Last automatic update: %s \n " \ " $( TZ = Asia/Manila date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %:z (Asia/Manila)' ) " \ > bot/last-run.txt The file contains a timestamp similar to: Last automatic update: 2026-07-17 10:03:24 +08:00 (Asia/Manila) After updating the file, the workflow configures the GitHub Actions bot identity and creates the commit: git config user.name "github-actions[bot]" git config user.email \ "41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com" git add bot/last-run.txt git commit -m "chore: daily automated update" Before pushing, it pulls the latest branch changes with rebase: git pull --rebase origin " ${ GITHUB_REF_NAME } " git push origin "HEAD: ${ GITHUB_REF_NAME } " This helps prevent the push from failing when another commit is added while the workflow is running. Repository Structure . ├── .github/ │ └── workflows/ │ └── daily-commit.yml ├── bot/ │ └── last-run.txt ├── LICENSE └── README.md Why I Built It Commit Cron is a small demonstration of: Scheduled GitHub Actions workflows Manual workflow triggers Automated file updates Bot-generated Git commits Repository write permissions using GITHUB_TOKEN The workflow uses: permissions : contents : write This allows the built-in GitHub token to push the generated commit. Important Note The automated commits only confirm that the work

GitHub announced on July 2, 2026 that Copilot CLI no longer needs a personal access token when it runs in GitHub Actions. Primary source: GitHub Changelog, July 2, 2026 . Deleting a secret is easy. Proving the workflow still works—and recovering without hurriedly pasting credentials back into YAML—is the useful part. This is an unexecuted migration template, not a report from a production repository. Make one reversible change First find every place the old secret enters the job, including reusable workflows: git grep -nE 'COPILOT_PAT|COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN|GH_TOKEN|github_pat' Record the workflow, job, pinned CLI version, permissions block, and previous known-good commit. Never print environment variables while debugging. Then remove only the PAT injection. Do not upgrade the runner and CLI in the same patch. jobs: copilot-check: permissions: contents: read - env: - COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.COPILOT_PAT }} steps: - uses: actions/checkout@<PINNED_COMMIT> - run: ./scripts/setup-copilot-cli.sh - run: ./scripts/run-bounded-check.sh The scripts are placeholders for repository-owned commands. “No PAT required” does not mean “no identity or permissions exist”; follow the current setup documentation and keep permissions explicit. Add a canary with two proofs The canary should show that the legacy token is absent and that the existing bounded task still satisfies its output contract. name : copilot-cli-auth-canary on : workflow_dispatch permissions : contents : read jobs : canary : runs-on : ubuntu-latest timeout-minutes : 10 steps : - uses : actions/checkout@<PINNED_COMMIT> - name : Verify legacy PAT is absent run : | test -z "${COPILOT_PAT:-}" test -z "${COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN:-}" - run : ./scripts/setup-copilot-cli.sh - run : copilot --version - run : ./scripts/run-bounded-check.sh Use a read-only, cheap task. “Fix whatever you find” is not a canary; it is a small deployment wearing a fake mustache. Define pass criteria before clicking Run: absent legacy variables, e

A while back I wrote about 64% of our merged PRs being written by AI . A few people (reasonably) asked: "nice story, but can I verify any of that?" So we put it on a public, auto-updating dashboard: 👉 www.codens.ai/stats/en It shows, for our GitHub organization: What % of merged PRs are authored by AI agents (currently 65%) Median time from PR-open to merge (2 minutes) Who merged what — task-execution agents vs maintenance bots vs auto-fix vs humans Weekly AI-merge counts and a per-repository breakdown Every number is tallied straight from the GitHub API by a small collector script, and the page regenerates itself weekly. We can't inflate it — it's measured, and the down weeks show up too (that's kind of the point). Why bother making it public Two reasons. 1. "Trust me bro" doesn't scale. When you claim most of your code is AI-written, the only honest move is to expose the raw counts so anyone can sanity-check them. The dashboard is that receipt. 2. It's a live dogfooding test. The whole thing — the PRD, the implementation, the review, the auto-fix on production errors — runs on Codens , our own AI dev-automation suite. If our own numbers ever tanked, the dashboard would be the first place it'd show. Public accountability is a good forcing function. Funny footnote: the dashboard itself was code-reviewed by our own AI reviewer before it shipped, and it caught two real bugs — an OG-image percentage that had drifted out of sync with the live number, and a broken error-fallback that would have blanked the page on malformed data. The tool built to sell "AI reviews your PRs" reviewed the PR that announces it. We'll take it. If you want to see the same machinery on your repos, there's a 14-day free trial (no card): codens.ai . Japanese version of the dashboard is here .

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has revolutionized how we provision and manage cloud resources. Tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and OpenTofu allow us to define infrastructure using code, making it versionable, repeatable, and scalable. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Misconfigurations in IaC can lead to massive security breaches, such as publicly exposed data storage or overly permissive access roles. This is where Static Application Security Testing (SAST) comes in. SAST tools analyze your source code to find security vulnerabilities before the code is deployed. In this article, we'll explore how to apply SAST to a Terraform project using Checkov , a popular open-source static analysis tool for IaC, and how to automate this process using GitHub Actions. (Note: We are intentionally avoiding tfsec for this demonstration to explore other powerful alternatives). Why Checkov? Checkov, created by Bridgecrew (now part of Prisma Cloud), is a static code analysis tool for IaC. It scans cloud infrastructure provisioned using Terraform, Terraform plan, Cloudformation, Kubernetes, Dockerfile, Serverless, or ARM Templates and detects security and compliance misconfigurations. It includes hundreds of built-in policies covering security and compliance best practices for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The Demo Scenario: A Vulnerable S3 Bucket Let's start by creating a simple Terraform configuration for an AWS S3 bucket. We will intentionally introduce a security misconfiguration: making the bucket public without encryption. Create a file named main.tf : # main.tf provider "aws" { region = "us-east-1" } resource "aws_s3_bucket" "my_vulnerable_bucket" { bucket = "my-company-public-data-bucket-12345" } # Misconfiguration 1: Public Read Access resource "aws_s3_bucket_acl" "example" { bucket = aws_s3_bucket . my_vulnerable_bucket . id acl = "public-read" } If we were to deploy this, anyone on the internet could read the contents of this bucket. Let's see how Checkov can

In modern software development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines...

GitHub said this week that Copilot CLI, when it runs inside a GitHub Actions workflow, will accept the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN for authentication. Per the July 2 changelog, the previous path required creating and storing a personal access token. The operational read is small and precise: one fewer human-owned credential to mint, rotate and inherit. The exact scope of the change The changelog covers a narrow surface. It applies to Copilot CLI when invoked from a GitHub Actions workflow, and it swaps the required credential from a PAT to the workflow's ambient GITHUB_TOKEN . GitHub does not describe changes to how Copilot CLI authenticates outside Actions, and this post will not extrapolate to those contexts. If your Copilot CLI usage lives on a developer laptop or in another CI system, nothing in this announcement moves for you. Why the PAT was the wrong credential to leave in the loop A personal access token has almost none of the properties you would want from an automation credential. It does not expire on a job boundary. It carries a person's identity, not the workflow's. It sits in Actions secrets long enough to outlive the engineer who created it. And its scopes were chosen by that engineer, at that moment, often wider than the job actually needs. GITHUB_TOKEN is the opposite shape. Actions mints it at the start of a job, scopes it through the workflow's permissions: block, and revokes it when the job ends. If the token leaks, the window for abuse is the runtime of the job, not the years until somebody remembers to rotate it. When the person who wrote the workflow leaves, the pipeline does not silently break because a token expired with their account. For scripted Copilot CLI calls that had to be wrapped in a PAT, that is the whole win. The tool authenticates against the workflow instead of against a human. Wiring it up The workflow-side pattern is the same one every GITHUB_TOKEN -consuming step already follows: declare permissions: explicitly at the job level, k

Last time I wrote about using glasp, a Go-based, npm-free CLI for Google Apps Script (GAS), in GitHub Actions. Previous post: Lean, Fast, Simple — npm-free GAS Deployment on GitHub Actions with glasp This time, a quick rundown of what landed in v0.3.0 and v0.4.0 . v0.3.0: PKCE support glasp login now supports PKCE (RFC 7636) as an opt-in. glasp login --pkce # or GLASP_USE_PKCE = 1 glasp login Each login generates a code_verifier and sends an S256 code_challenge to Google. It's a defense against authorization code interception, and it coexists fine with the existing client_secret flow. It only applies to the interactive login — --auth / GLASP_AUTH for CI is untouched. Off by default. Worth turning on if you're in a stricter security environment. v0.4.0: Timeouts and retries The focus here is basically "can this run unattended in CI/CD without falling over." Timeouts Script API requests previously had no timeout — a stuck request could hang the job indefinitely. v0.4.0 adds a 180s default. glasp push --timeout 60 # set to 60s glasp push --no-timeout # disable Also configurable via GLASP_TIMEOUT / GLASP_NO_TIMEOUT env vars or timeoutSeconds in .glasp/config.json . Priority: --no-timeout > flag/env > config > default. If the config file is broken, it warns instead of silently falling back. Retries Transient failures (5xx, 429) now get retried automatically. glasp push --max-retries 5 glasp push --no-retries 3 retries by default (up to 4 attempts total) Only applies to idempotent commands: push , pull , clone , list-deployments Commands with side effects ( create-script , run-function , etc.) are never retried Exponential backoff with jitter, respecting Retry-After It's implemented as a single http.RoundTripper wrapper, so the Google SDK itself isn't touched — same pattern as the timeout implementation. retryTransport → oauth2.Transport → http.DefaultTransport Some refactoring, too Internal packages got reorganized ( #107 ), and the hand-rolled retry transport was swappe

trpc has a scheduled workflow called "Lock Issues & PRs." Its own scorecard shows it failing on almost every run. It is still scheduled, still running, still red. trpc ships excellent software, which is exactly the point: if a project this careful has a workflow that has been red for ages, the rest of us almost certainly do too. It is not a one-off. drizzle-orm has one ("Unpublish release"). cal.com has one ("PR Update"). I scanned 35 popular open-source repos and the same thing kept turning up: a scheduled workflow that fails on nearly every run, quietly, for a long time. Why nobody notices GitHub does email you when a scheduled workflow fails. So how do these survive? Two reasons. First, those emails are routine. You get them for flaky reruns and transient blips too, so you filter them out. Second, a workflow that is always red stops reading as a signal. It is just how that row looks now. I did exactly this on my own project. GitHub emailed me that a workflow had failed. The next day it emailed again. I saw it, told myself I would fix it tomorrow, and promptly forgot. It was my nightly database backup, quietly broken the whole time, and I only caught it when a failure-rate number crept up where I would notice. An always-red workflow is not free It burns minutes every run to produce nothing but a red X. Worse, it trains you to ignore the failure that actually matters: the day a real one lands in the same inbox you have learned to skim past. How to find yours Open your Actions tab and look at the scheduled workflows, the cron-triggered ones nobody watches. If the last several runs are all red, you found one. From the CLI: gh run list --workflow = "Lock Issues & PRs" --status = failure What to do about it Two honest options: fix it, or if the workflow is genuinely abandoned, turn it off. Do not leave it scheduled and red. gh workflow disable "Lock Issues & PRs" Or drop the schedule trigger from the workflow file if it should not run on a timer at all. A disabled work

Two days ago GitHub emailed me to say one of my workflows had failed. The next day it emailed me again. I saw it, told myself I would fix it tomorrow, and promptly forgot. It was my nightly database backup, quietly broken the whole time, and I only caught it because a failure-rate number nudged up. A failed run at least gets you an email. A slow run gets you nothing. GitHub never pings you when CI quietly takes twice as long, runs the whole suite twice per PR, or rebuilds dependencies from scratch every time. That waste compounds where no one looks. Here are the usual culprits, each with the exact fix. When I scanned 35 popular open-source repos, not one had a fully clean config. 32 of 35 had no concurrency control, 33 of 35 had no job timeouts, and 22 of 35 ran the full suite twice on every PR. If projects this polished leave minutes on the table, the rest of us definitely do. Your suite runs twice on every PR Trigger a workflow on both push and pull_request and, for a branch in the same repo, opening a PR fires both. You just paid for two identical runs. This one is pure waste and it can roughly halve your PR-related minutes. Trigger on pull_request , and keep push for your default branch: on : push : branches : [ main ] pull_request : Old runs don't cancel when you push again Push a fix 30 seconds after the first push and, with no concurrency group, both runs go to completion. The first is dead weight, and it is holding a slot in your queue while it finishes. This hides even when you do have a group: astro has a concurrency group on one workflow but left off cancel-in-progress , which our scan estimates leaves roughly 1,850 minutes a month on the table. Add a group keyed on the branch, with cancel-in-progress , so a new push supersedes the old run: concurrency : group : ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }} cancel-in-progress : true Every run reinstalls dependencies from scratch No cache means every run re-downloads and rebuilds your dependencies. On a typical

In the previous article on hosting a Next.js app on a VPS , I'd left the deployment pipeline as a rough sketch: four lines to say "it ships to production on its own when you push." That's the piece I want to open up here, because it's what separates a VPS you fuss over by hand from infrastructure you can forget about. There's a stubborn myth that CI/CD is a big-company thing, with a dedicated DevOps team and six-figure tooling. Not true. The pipeline that deploys this portfolio fits in two YAML files, you can read it in five minutes, and it gives me back exactly the comfort I liked about Vercel: I push to master , I go grab a coffee, the app is live when I'm back. The one thing I gained along the way is knowing precisely what happens between the git push and the running container. Four steps, in this order Deployment is a chain. On every push to master , GitHub Actions runs lint, security scan, image build, and deploy. What matters is the needs : as long as a step fails, the following ones don't start. A critical vulnerability caught by the scan, and the image never gets built. At all. jobs : lint : # ESLint runs-on : ubuntu-latest # ... security : # Trivy scan (reusable workflow) uses : ./.github/workflows/security.yml build-push : # build the Docker image → push to GHCR needs : [ lint , security ] # ... deploy : # SSH to the VPS → docker compose pull && up -d needs : [ build-push ] # ... Lint first, because it's the cheapest step and there's no point building an image if ESLint is already screaming. The scan next, as a barrier. Then the build, which produces the Docker image and pushes it to GHCR, GitHub's container registry (private, in my case). And finally the deploy, which connects over SSH to the VPS, pulls the new image and restarts the container. Four links, each blocking the next. That's the whole secret. The security scan is in the path, not in a review "for later" This is the one I won't budge on. Dependency security, in a lot of projects, is a Dependabo

Browser automation with Playwright, Python, GitHub Actions, and Entire to auto-enter San Francisco Stern Grove concert lotteries each week!