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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

That's a very nice hack of github actions. The strength of that is to have super reliable storage but the risk is to loose everything because you don't respect the Github terms of use.

Here is the term of use of Actions if anyone interested : https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

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The relevant section seems to be "Additionally, Actions should not be used for...any other activity unrelated to the production, testing, deployment, or publication of the software project associated with the repository where GitHub Actions are used."

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore this usage of GH actions. But isn't this a TOS violation? I've thought about using GH actions as a generalized cron for online stuff and that feels like it walks the line (e.g. re-generating my static site via a Netlify webhook so it can update comments or whatnot). I feel okay about it because the static site is what's contained in the repo.

I've discussed this technique with GitHub employees about this technique in the past and no-one has raised any concerns about it. Maybe I wasn't talking to the right employees though.

No, that's great to hear! My concerns are assuaged.

> super reliable

i've been scraping daily for most of this year, and fwiw gh actions fail pretty regularly. here's my actions log: https://github.com/sw-yx/gh-action-data-scraping/actions?que...

so if you want reliable data scraping you'll actually have to build in some sort of retry capability so as not to lose data. just fyi for anyone here

I tend to run these against things that are unlikely to complain about it - most government data sources are OK in my experience.

If you're scraping against the terms of service of something you'll probably want to pay for a private repository.

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