Publishing Bubos RSS to Netlify with GitHub Actions

• ~300 words • 1 minute read

I've made a slight update to Bubo RSS, my irrationally minimal open-source RSS reader project. When I originally wrote about it last November one of the major selling points of the project was how you could deploy it to Netlify with just a few clicks. While that's still true, an important thing changed shortly afer I wrote that: Netlify now charges for build minutes. If you're pinging Bubo pretty frequently to re-build and if you have a decent number of RSS feeds to parse the build minutes can get gobbled up surprisingly fast!

To fix that I created an alternative branch called github-action-publishing that uses GitHub Actions to basically run the npm run build process on GitHub's servers instead of Netlify's:

https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss/tree/github-action-publishing

The gist of what's different:

  • Updated .gitignore to no longer ignore the ./output/index.html file that gets generated served
  • Changed netlify.toml to no longer run npm run build
  • Added a GitHub Action that runs the build process and commits an updated ./output/index.html back to the repository

On the Netlify side of things, it will see the new file committed to the repository and pull in the latest changes just like it did before. The process is significantly faster now since it's basically just serving a static file, and doesn't eat into build minutes nearly so much. There's also a little bit more information in the updated README about how it works and advice on changing the default branch it commits to from master to something else.

Update: There is now an easily remixable version on Glitch as well:

https://glitch.com/edit/#!/bubo-rss

Frankly, that's probably the quickest way to start playing around with Bubo RSS. You also don't have to worry about any of this build minutes stuff or configure any GitHub Actions :)