In this article, we will cover two different ways of showing your reading interests through your GitHub profile: manually adding your DevCard by copying the code and automatically updating DevCard by leveraging GitHub actions.
A while ago, we launched dev cards! A fantastic concept where you can show off how many articles you read, your favorite publications, and show off your rank!
What it does is it will automatically get your own DevCard and download it to your profile repository.
This means we can automatically run this action every x time and get the latest DevCard.
Let’s see how we can use it for our profile.
Click on the Actions button for your profile repository and set up a new workflow yourself.
From there, it will create a basic workflow that we’ll start modifying.
Change the name of the workflow to ‘DevCard’.
Then we want to set two ways our action should be triggered, the first being if there is a push on the master branch.
The other one is a schedule, which acts as a cronjob and will return every {x} time. In our case, we will run it every night at 00:00.
*Also note how we set write permissions.
permissions:
contents: write
on:
workflow_dispatch:
push:
branches:
- main
schedule:
- cron: "0 0 * * *"
The workflow_dispatch tells the action it can manually run from the Actions tab.
Then we want to create a new job that will run the DevCard GitHub action. We need to set one variable for our version, which will be the ID of the DevCard we are fetching.
Which means our ID is b2a0b896ef724e68a2364c727e8e9e6e.
Now we can head back to GitHub and click the Settings tab. From there, choose the Secret section and generate a new secret.
This secret should have the following name: DEVCARD_ID and the value we just retrieved from the image.
Now we can head over to the Actions tab and run our workflow. Once the workflow is done, you should see a green icon on your workflow.
Head back to your repository, and suddenly you will see there is a new file called devcard.svg.
All we have to do now is update our README.md file to use this generated file like so:
<a href="https://app.daily.dev/DailyDevTips"><img src="https://github.com/rebelchris/rebelchris/blob/master/devcard.svg" width="400" alt="Chris Bongers's Dev Card"/></a>
Where you have to modify the href, rebelchris/rebelchris, and alt parts to be your repository name.
And there you go! You now have an automatically updating DevCard on your GitHub profile.
Keep your GitHub action up-to-date with GitHub Dependabot
If you opted for the GitHub action method, you might consider using Dependabot for this repo. It will make sure you are always using the latest version of our GitHub action. To enable Dependabot for this repository, all you need to do is add a `.github/dependabot.yml` file with the following contents.