HACKER Q&A
📣 sirspacey

How do you automate file upload to GitHub?


I’ve been exploring Git workflows and curious how others would approach this challenge:

We need to upload a file to GitHub on demand (a table routing JSON file to minimize API calls) and want to automate it so non-technical users can push the file.

Our ideal workflow is to generate the JSON and push automatically via webhook or API call

How would you approach it? Things you’d be concerned about with this approach?

Some additional context:

- We have to solve this problem in this way due to limitations with another code base we rely on.

- this is a private repo so we aren’t concerned about merge issues, just overwriting the file is fine

  👤 mystified5016 Accepted Answer ✓
#!/bin/bash

commandToGenerateFile > file.json #or wget some.server.tld/autogen.json file.json git add file.json git commit -m "Automatic upload " git push

You can do this in any number of ways. Powershell, batch script, bash, you could even build a little GUI if you want.

If you want to get fancier, throw the script on a server and give users an SSH script they can double-click, or hook it up to some intranet web interface.

This isn't a particularly complex problem, and git was designed to handle use cases just like this.

Of course you could absolutely overcomplicate and burn dozens of engineer hours building some kubernetes cluster or AWS swarm, but you can do this with a script so simple that I wrote it on my phone.

👤 sdex
Just use gist files API.

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/gists/gists?apiVersion=2022-...

👤 dan_can_code
I'm not sure if it's overkill but decapCMS [0] (formerly netlifyCMS) uses git for its publishing method to store static files and content. It's quite simple and open source, and might even just serve as good inspiration for your final solution.

[0] - https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms

👤 hotdogs
If it's JSON it sounds more like config than code. Does it actually need to live in the GitHub repo? Could your application read it from an external location (where ever the rest of your configs live) and reload it on an API call or periodically?
👤 codingdave
I mean, we're talking about git here - so you don't need to re-invent pushing a file to the repo. What you need to focus on is building a UX that abstracts it so the non-tech folk don't need to do it via command line.

So the question is less about pushing to git and more about what causes the file to update in the first place. If it is an automated update, just have whatever task updates it also run the git command to push it. If it is a manual update, what tool are the non-tech people using that makes it happen? Add a button to that tool which runs the command.