Schedule Discussion Post Action

This action will create a discussion post in a repository at a scheduled time.

Why would I use this?

1. You want to schedule a Discusion post to go live at a specific time in the future (examples: announcements, weekly updates, when you're out of office, etc.)
2. You want to post a Discussion post on behalf of someone else (example: posting on behalf of an executive)
3. You want to coordinate a "comms cascade" creation of a post across multiple repositories (example: a cross-organizational announcement made my multiple authors in multiple repos, with messages tailored to each audience)

Usage

Setting up the action requires three steps (described in detail below):

1. Set up this action
2. Add a Personal Access Token to the repository secrets
3. Create one or more draft discussion posts

Concepts

The Action is intended to be used with two or more repositories:

• The first repository is the "source" repository. This repository contains the GitHub Action configuration as well as one or more "draft" discussion posts. You'll likely want to lock this repoisotry down to those that are part of the drafting process.
• The second repository (or third, or forth) is the "target" repository. This repository is where the discussion posts will be created. The repository can be set per draft, and will likely have a wider audience (e.g., those that you want to be able to read the published discussion posts)

Draft discussion posts live as .md files in the root of the source repository. When the action runs (on a regular basis), it will look for any draft posts that are scheduled to be published (publication date in the past) and will create a coresponding discussion post in the target repository. You can schedule as many draft discussion posts as you'd like. Once published, the draft post will be deleted. to keep things tidy in the source repository.

Step 1: Set up this action

Create a .github/workflows/schedule-discussion-post.yml file in your repository with the following content:

name: Schedule Discussion Posts

on:
  # Check for drafts to post every hour at the top of the hour
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 * * * *'

  # Optional, allows you to post on demand
  push:
    branches:
      - 'main'
    paths:
      - '**.md'

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  schedule-discussion-posts:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: benbalter/schedule-discussion-posts-action@main
        with:
          discussion_token: ${{ secrets.DISCUSSION_TOKEN }}

This will run approximately on the top of the hour, every hour to check for posts to pubish. You can use tools like crontab.guru to adjust the schedule to your liking.

Pro-tip: If this is a new repository, be sure to enable Discussions via the settings.

Step 2: Add a Personal Access Token to the repository secrets

For the Action to work, the intended author will need to create a Personal Access Token:

1. Navigate to github.com/settings/tokens.
2. Click "Generate new token".
3. Give the token a descriptive name.
4. Set a long expiration date (e.g., 1 year)
5. Choose "only select repositories" and choose one or more repositories that you want to post to.
6. Under repository permissions choose "Discussions" and grant "read and write" access
7. Click "Generate token" and copy the token
8. Save the token as a secret (DISCUSSION_TOKEN) in the repository where you set up the Action.

Note: You can optionally create a legacy PAT which would not have an expiration date, but that would grant discussion read/write access to all repositories that the author has access to.

Pro-tip: Set a calendar reminder to roll the token prior to the expiration date.

Step 3: Create a draft discussion post

Discussion posts start as .md files in the root of the repository where you set up the Action (the source repository). You can schedule as many posts as you'd like. Posts are standard Markdown files, with a few extra "front matter" fields at the top. Here's an example:

---
title: An important post
date: 2021-10-01T12:00:00Z
repository: github/schedule-discussion-post-action
category: General
labels: announcement, engineering
---

Body of the post here in standard Markdown.

Note: You do not (and should not) include the title in the body of the draft as an H1. Instead, add it to the front matter so that it can be set appropriately.

The following front matter fields are supported:

• title (required): The title of the discussion post
• date (required): The date and time to post the discussion post. The Action will do its best to parse most common formats. When in doubt, ISO 8601 is your friend.
• repository (required): The target repository where the discussion post will be created. Must be in the format owner/repository.
• category (required): The category of the discussion post.
• labels (optional): A comma-separated list of labels to apply to the discussion post.
• author (optional): The GitHub handle of the author of the post. Defaults to the owner of the DISCUSSION_TOKEN.

Note: Setting labels is not yet implemented due to restrictions with the GitHub API.

But what if I did something wrong? (Optional)

For additional peace of mind, you can set up a "linter" to check your drafts. Create a .github/workflows/lint-drafts.yml file in your source repository with the following content:

name: Lint drafts

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  changed_files:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    name: Test changed-files
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Get all changed markdown files
        id: changed-markdown-files
        uses: tj-actions/changed-files@v44
        with:
          json: true
          escape_json: false
          files: |
            **.md

      - name: Lint markdown files
        uses: benbalter/schedule-discussion-posts-action@main
        if: steps.changed-markdown-files.outputs.any_changed == 'true'
        with:
          dry_run: true
          files: ${{ steps.changed-markdown-files.outputs.all_changed_files }}
          discussion_token: ${{ secrets.DISCUSSION_TOKEN }}

This will run through the entire process of parsing and validating any changed draft in a pull request, but stop shot of actually creating the discussion post. If there are any issues, the Action will fail and provide feedback on what needs to be fixed. This should catch most issues giving you confidence that the post will be created as expected.

Note: This Workflow file assumes you're using a pull request workflow. If you're not, adjust the on trigger accordingly (example: on push to main).

Example Lint output:

Advanced Usage

The Action accepts the following with: parameters:

• discussion_token (required): The Personal Access Token to use to create the discussion post. Must have read/write access to the target repository.
• repo_token (optional): The Personal Access Token to use to read the draft discussion posts. Must have read access to the source repository. Defaults to the github.token provided by the GitHub Actions runtime.
• dry_run (optional): If set to true, the Action will parse the draft discussion posts, but will not create the discussion posts. Defaults to false.
• files (optional): A JSON-formatted array of files to parse. Defaults to all .md files in the repository root.

Multiple authors

By default, the action will use the DISCUSSION_TOKEN secret to create the discussion post (which will be authored by the user who created the token). If you want to specify a different author, you can add an author field to the front matter of the draft post with their handle. For example:

---
title: Another important post, authored by someone else
date: 2021-10-01T12:00:00Z
repositotry: github/schedule-discussion-post-action
category: General
author: hubot
---

You will then need to follow the instructions above to create a Personal Access Token for that user and add it to the repository secrets as DISCUSSION_TOKEN_$HANDLE (in this case, DISCUSSION_TOKEN_HUBOT).

Finally, you will need to update the Action configuration to pass the additional token. For example:

jobs:
  schedule-discussion-posts:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: benbalter/schedule-discussion-posts-action@main
        with:
          # The default token used when no author is specified
          discussion_token: ${{ secrets.DISCUSSION_TOKEN }}

          # The token to use when the author is hubot
          discussion_token_hubot: ${{ secrets.DISCUSSION_TOKEN_HUBOT }}

You may add as many authors to a repository as you'd like, each with their own token. The Action will use the appropriate token based on the author specified in the draft post. If the author specified does not have a corresponding token, the Action will try to use the default token, but will warn you that the author is not set up correctly when you do a dry run.

Note: If the author's handle has - in it, replace the - with _ when naming the secret as GitHub Actions does not allow -s in secret names.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any issues, please check the following:

1. Re-run the action with debug logging enabled
2. Ensure branch protection rules / rulesets are not preventing the action from deleting the post once published