An utterly simple Github action that lets you publish draft posts from a draft posts directory to the directory where your SSG(Static Site Generator) of choice expects your published posts to be.

It's tested and built with Astro in mind, but as long as your SSG expects the published markdown content in a folder, the job should be as easy as configuring a draft and a published directory.

Since the draft posts are posts intended to be published in the future, create posts with future dates in the /src/drafts folder.

Go to Github Actions tab and add the following lines while configuring your action

name: Publish Blog Drafts

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ main ]
  schedule:
    - cron: '30 */4 * * *' # Every four hours!

jobs:
  publish-drafts:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: SSG Publish Drafts
        # You may pin to the exact commit or the version.
        uses: one-aalam/github-action-astro-publish-drafts@v0.1-beta
        with:
          github_token: $\{{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          github_actor: one-aalam # Your Github username
          github_repository: one-aalam/astro-ink-cms # Repository URL

You're using v0.1-beta of this action,

The above changes will configure v0.1-beta of this action with your repo that will run on push, pull and every 4 hours

There are SSG(Static Site Generators) in the wild like Jekyll that support the concept of future posts with specially recognized markdown front-matter attributes like published, future and conventions like having a _drafts. You write your posts with one of these flags or put them in the _drafts folder, and Jekyll will bring them in line with published posts if started as jekyll server --unpublished or jekyll server --future. The third approach with _drafts seems to be the cleanest of all as you won't mix up the posts you're working up with the posts that are already published. Plus, you won't need a new attribute to specially know the future posts.

This seems like a very nice-to-have future for a site generation tool but isn't something it must introduce in its markdown compilation pipeline, as it could increase the build time (based on the number of posts). Moreover, you might wanna skip the build, when there are no draft posts.

Seems like a duty that should be done externally? Probably, a script that could be configured through CRON for periodic checks/builds?

Enter github-action-ssg-publish-drafts. It's the script you'd like to run for publishing the posts from your draft folder to the folder that auto-generates your pages from the existing markdown posts like /src/pages/blog/*.md(Astro). Create posts in a /src/drafts directory with the date field set to a future date in YYYY-MM-DD format, and let this action do the rest. Do a bit of CRON-Jitsu, and run this action at a time more appropriate to your authoring/publishing schedule.