Create a todolist robot with daily email notification

What’s Github Actions#

Github Actions is a CI(continuous integration) and CD(continuous deployment) service that help you automate your software development workflows in the same place you store code and collaborate on pull requests and issues. It was launched in October 2018 and was officially available to all users in November 2019. With Github Actions you can write individual tasks, called actions, and combine them to create a custom workflow. Workflows are custom automated processes that you can set up in your repository to build, test, package, release, or deploy any code project on GitHub.

You can create workflows using actions defined in your repository, open source actions in a public repository on GitHub, or a published Docker container image. But workflows in forked repositories don’t run by default. If you don’t want to create your actions by yourself, you can discover actions in the GitHub Marketplace, also you can share your actions with the Marketplace.

Ok, now let’s go.

Getting started#

We can get this Send Mail Actions from here or source. It help us send email to our inbox.

Configuring Github Actions#

We should create a directory named .github/workflows to store our workflow files at the root of our repository. In .github/workflows, add a .yml or .yaml file for our workflow. For example, .github/workflows/auto.yml.

First we set a trigger#

name: GitHub Actions Email Bot
on:
schedule:
  - cron: '0 22 * * *'

In the above code, name is actions description, on is the trigger condition. We use the POSIX cron syntax to schedule the workflow. It is triggered at 6<00am>(UTC+8) everyday.

Next writing a TODO list and converting it from markdown to html#

runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
  - name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v2.0.0
  - name: Get pandoc
run: sudo apt-get install pandoc
  - name: Convert My TODO List
run: pandoc ./TODO.md > todo.html

Last configuring the send email actions#

- name: Send email
  uses: dawidd6/action-send-mail@v1.3.0
  with:
server_address: smtp.gmail.com
server_port: 465
username: ${{ secrets.MAIL_USERNAME }}
password: ${{ secrets.MAIL_PASSWORD }}
subject: My TODO List
body: file://todo.html
to: test@example.com
from: TODO List Notification
content_type: text/html

For security, we should set our email username and password in the settings/secrets menu of the project. I set my email username like MAIL_USERNAME, password like MAIL_PASSWORD.

Now we can receive a TODO list email every morning.

This is my full todo.yaml:

name: GitHub Actions Email Bot
on:
  schedule:
- cron: '0 22 * * *'
jobs:
  Todo_bot:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
  - name: Checkout
    uses: actions/checkout@v2.0.0
  - name: Get pandoc
    run: sudo apt-get install pandoc
  - name: Get My TODO List
    run: pandoc ./TODO.md > result.html
  - name: Send email
    uses: dawidd6/action-send-mail@v1.3.0
    with:
      server_address: smtp.gmail.com
      server_port: 465
      username: ${{ secrets.MAIL_USERNAME }}
      password: ${{ secrets.MAIL_PASSWORD }}
      subject: TODO List
      body: file://result.html
      to: test@example.com
      from: TODO List Notification
      content_type: text/html