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Comment by iRomain | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool! But, before you jump into it... Unless Github have changed their terms, this is against the ToS of Github actions. If I recall correctly, they are meant to be used for building/testing/maintaining the project included in the repo.

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Regardless, don't lean on these big-tech central points of failure. It can be taken away from you on the arbitrary whim of some exec - not a great resilience plan for an availability monitor if you're doing anything remotely serious.

You must rely on some big-tech with status page because you can't do it within your own infrastructure.

There are some non-big-tech status pages. I use Oh Dear (from a previous recommendation on HN).

Here's the direct link: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

> Actions should not be used for: [...]

> if using GitHub-hosted runners, any other activity unrelated to the production, testing, deployment, or publication of the software project associated with the repository where GitHub Actions are used.

Also, GitHub actions is not necessarily free. There is a $0.008/minute fee for every run. You just don’t think about it because you have minutes included in your current plan. This tool runs every 5 minutes which by my math equates to ~8640 runs/month. GitHub’s free edition has 2000 minutes/month. You can see how this might actually be great for GitHub’s bottom line.

Maker here. When you have an open-source project (i.e., public repository), you get unlimited minutes for free. The free edition's 2,000 minutes per month only count if it's a private repository.

Thanks Intel!

I wonder how long github will allow unlimited free minutes, when more and more such non-CI projects are popping up.

Isn't this maintaining?

Generally it’ll be used for monitoring uptime of another project. So even if that falls under “maintaining” it wouldn’t be for the project “in the repository”, unless you somehow combine upptime into the repo of the project you’re monitoring. But that could get very messy.

You can use `git checkout --orphan gh-pages` to make a branch with no parent commit. Put the upptime stuff there and maybe it just works in the same project. I haven't tried upptime, so ymmv.

That is irrelevant. Project to repository mapping is arbitrary.

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