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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

This feels like it's pushing the TOS for Github Actions a bit by using it for post deployment, live operations. Like the hourly health check and your dead letter queue scheduler.

It made me curious, so I looked at their TOS[1], and they seem somewhat permissive about things like this. Though vague about where/when you cross the line.

Like, this seems clear:

"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."

But then:

"but a low benefit Action could be ok if it’s also low burden"

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-f...

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Also note that Github will deactivate cron actions if there is no activity in the repo for 60 days.

https://github.community/t/do-disabled-scheduled-workflows-r...

But you do get an email warning you, with a button to say 'no, keep going'.

(I maintain docker images for gocryptfs & mergerfs - https://github.com/OJFord/docker-gocryptfs https://github.com/OJFord/docker-mergerfs - that check for updates to those respective projects and push an updated image; if there's no new upstream version for a while then I get that email and have to click it to keep it running.)

Obviously you can automate that with another repo that has a cron job to push a dummy commit every 30 days.

In fact, they can play ping pong and keep each other going forever :)

You don't need seperate repository for that. You can use Personal Access Token & self-push.

I have a crown action which commits its own log. So, always active!

Perhaps for the virtual machine. If this concerns you this could be used with GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runners.

SHRs let you use github workflows while performing operations from local machines.

These machines can be set behind a firewall.

Perhaps some of the novelty of this project is that it doesn’t require any paid cloud resources other than AWS.

But it does not take much to set up a self hosted runner locally.

Interesting. I use Github Actions to tag incoming bugs with a "needs-triage" tag. That is not related to production, testing, deployment, or publication, so I guess I'm not in compliance.

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