Schedule Blog Post With Forgejo Actions

I have been having a lot of fun lately writing articles for this blog. So, much fun that I have written quite a few articles. However, I do not want to publish them all at once but every to weeks or so.

Hugo

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I use the static site generator Hugo for this site, and Hugo by default does not publish articles with a future date. So, the Hugo part is straightforward. Just make a bunch of articles and set the date to when it should be published in the future.

But, I do not want to remember to trigger Netlify to build the site on those dates. Therefore, it needs to be automated. Netlify is set up to trigger at build every time a commit is made to the main branch, are pushed on GitHub.

Last Code on GitHub

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This site is the only code I have left on GitHub. I work off my self-hosted Forgejo instance, and it mirrors to GitHub. It is done this way because Netlify has a good integration with GitHub. I am working on another solution to get rid of GitHub entirely but, this works for now.

How-to

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However, that does not work when we want to trigger a build on a specific time. Fortunately, Netlify have build hooks that allow a build to be triggered at any time. Just add a new build hook at Project configuration / Build & deploy / Build hooks This generates a url with a unique ID.

Clicking the build hook URL reveales the command to use.

curl -X POST -d {} https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/<ID>

Every time that command is run a build will trigger on Netlify.

Now we just need to automate it. Since it just a command that need to be run at a set time there are many ways to automate it. I could just set up a CRON job on my server. But, for me, it made sense to use the Forgejo CICD system because then the automation is with the code.

1. Create a secret with the unique ID in Settings / Actions / Secrets so that the secret cannot be leaked by accident. I called mine NETLIFY_CRON_BUILD_HOOK

2. If they do not exist create the folders .forgejo/workflows on root. This is where the automation definitions live.

3. Create a <Automation Name>.yml file. I called mine; build.yml

4. Add automation to file and use the secret to get the unique ID.

name: Cron Build
run-name: Run Build

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 6 * * MON"
 
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: docker
    container:
      image: ubuntu:latest
    steps:
      - name: apt update
        run: apt update

      - name: Install curl
        run: apt -y install curl

      - name: Trigger our build webhook on Netlify
        run: curl -X POST -d {} "https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/${TOKEN}"
        env:
          TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NETLIFY_CRON_BUILD_HOOK }}

Now a build is triggered every monday at 06:00/6AM UTC and every article where the date is no longer in the future will be published.