I've made a get-releases-action using GitHub API

Time for Action

Curiosity leads to action

Curiosity.., I was curious about GitHub actions, how they work and how can I build my own. That's right, it's always things you see and use, to leads invent or reinvent the wheel.

I created one and currently using the action in my profile https://github.com/jayantur13 to showcase my project releases. The name of the action is get-latest-releases in GitHub Marketplace.

The Making

During the making I followed the official documentation, some actions from Marketplace and other repos. Also, to get a start I vibed and found some great results.
My GitHub action is very simple. It works in following steps:

1. Requires user/repo_name
2. Make HTTP request to fetch releases of a user/repo_name, then detects if README.md has

<!--LATEST_RELEASES_START-->
<!--LATEST_RELEASES_END-->

1. Auto-commit (if true) with all release data to README.md
2. To avoid always committing there's a .json file that saves the info. > Necessary log for both success and failure case. > As actions are soon deprecating the use of node20 and asking to use node24, at first, I struggled to make the build work then used esbuild (or rollup was other option)

Here's the action

name: Fetch and upate with latest release

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 * * *" # daily at midnight UTC
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  update_releases:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Update latest releases
        uses: jayantur13/get-latest-releases@v1
        with:
          repos: |
            vercel/next.js
            facebook/react
          readme_path: "README.md"
          max_repos: "3"
          theme: list
          include_body: "true"
          exclude_prereleases: "false"
          header_title: ""
          footer_link_text: "Explore More →"
          show_global_footer: "true"
          date_format: "short"
          skip_if_no_change: "true"
          auto_commit: "true"
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Under. GitHub/workflows/action_name.yml it will run daily UTC midnight

Here's the detail about parameters:

Name	Description	Default	Required
repos	List of repositories (owner/repo) separated by newlines	–	✅
readme_path	Path to your README file	README.md	❌
max_repos	Maximum number of repositories to display	5	❌
include_body	Include release notes text	true	❌
exclude_prereleases	Skip prereleases	true	❌
theme	Markdown layout: table, list, card, compact	table	❌
header_title	Custom section title (value,"")	🔖 Latest Releases	❌
footer_link_text	Text for global footer link	See All Releases →	❌
show_global_footer	Show or hide the footer link	true	❌
date_format	Date format (ISO, relative, none)	ISO	❌
skip_if_no_change	Skip update if no new release is found	true	❌
auto_commit	Automatically commit README changes	false	❌
token	GitHub token for API access	${{ github.token }}	❌

Theme Appearance

Card

Table

List

Compact

I found a useful action like listing blog post in readme, which had me curious and inspired me to try making this action.

I am not much of writer. But yeah, tried to write and if, you like this article react/comment in this post and give a try to get-latest-releases in GitHub Marketplace.

Thanks for reading.