GitHub Action for Autoformatting TIL README's

A GitHub action that can be used with a TIL repo to autogenerate a README.md.

I came across this post (Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs) from Simon Willison on Hacker News and thought it was a pretty good idea. The author talks about how he uses TILs to learn in public and how he uses GitHub actions to automatically create a formatted README.md summary of his TILs when he pushes code. I saw this and thought, hey if we use GitHub actions to do this, why not make a GitHub Action?

If you have a TIL repository with TILs organized into folders by category you can add this GitHub action to generate a nice README when you push a new TIL.

How To Use

Add this Action to your TIL repo. Here's an example:

.github/workflows/build.yml

name: Build README
on:
  push:
    branches:
    - master
    paths-ignore:
    - README.md
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Check out repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
      with:
        # necessary for github-action-til-autoformat-readme
        fetch-depth: 0
    - name: Autoformat README
      uses: cflynn07/[email protected]
      with:
        description: |
          A collection of concrete writeups of small things I learn daily while working
          and researching. My goal is to work in public. I was inspired to start this
          repository after reading Simon Wilson's [hacker new post][1], and he was
          apparently inspired by Josh Branchaud's [TIL collection][2].
        footer: |
          [1]: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Apr/20/self-rewriting-readme/
          [2]: https://github.com/jbranchaud/til
        list_most_recent: 2 # optional, lists most recent TILS below description
        date_format: "2020 Jan 15:04" # optional, must align to https://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Format

Generated README.md example

You can see an example of a sample TIL repo with the action here:
cflynn07/til-autoformat-action-example

# TIL
> Today I Learned

A collection of concrete writeups of small things I learn daily while working
and researching. My goal is to work in public. I was inspired to start this
repository after reading Simon Wilson's [hacker new post][1], and he was
apparently inspired by Josh Branchaud's [TIL collection][2].

_3 TILs and counting..._

---

### 2 most recent TILs

- [How to add a CSS border](css/how-to-add-a-border.md) - Sat Apr 25 19:39:03 2020 +0800
- [How to make a div](html/how-to-make-a-div.md) - Sat Apr 25 17:53:55 2020 +0800

### Categories

- [css](#css)
- [html](#html)
- [k8s](#k8s)

### [css](#css)
- [How to add a CSS border](css/how-to-add-a-border.md)

### [html](#html)
- [How to make a div](html/how-to-make-a-div.md)

### [k8s](#k8s)
- [how to blow up a k8s cluster](k8s/how-to-blow-up-a-cluster.md)

[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Apr/20/self-rewriting-readme/
[2]: https://github.com/jbranchaud/til