For Day 1 of my Advent of AI challenge, I built a GitHub Action that uses the Goose CLI to generate a daily fortune with ASCII art. I hadn't run Goose in CI before, so I got to level up there.
What I Built
A scheduled workflow that:
- Runs daily at 6am ET
- Uses Goose with Claude Sonnet 4 (via OpenRouter) to generate creative random daily fortunes
- Creates ASCII art featuring a sassy goose
- Automatically commits updates to the README
Check out the repo to see today's daily fortune!
🔮 Fortune Teller Output
+====================================================================+
| |
| 🔮 MYSTICAL FORTUNE TELLER 🔮 |
| |
| Generated on: 2025-12-02 at 06:39:22 |
| |
| ✨ YOUR POETIC FORTUNE ✨ |
| |
| The moonbeams dance upon your door, |
| Bringing treasures from distant shore. |
| With heart so pure and mind so keen, |
| Wonders await, as yet unseen. |
| |
| |
+====================================================================+
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+====================================================================+
| |
| 🦢 PRESENTED BY YOUR SASSY GOOSE ORACLE 🦢 |
| |
| .-""-. |
| / \ |
| | o o | |
| | < | |
| | ___ | |
| \ ___ / |
| '--^--' |
| / \ |
| / HONK! \ |
| / 🦢 \ |
| ( ___ ) |
| \ / \ / |
| | | ^ ^ | |Getting Goose and CI to Play Nice
The installation script is great for local dev, but in CI? Not so much. It tries to run an interactive configuration step, which obviously doesn't work in GitHub Actions.
Key Learnings
1. Skip the install script, go manual
Instead of using the install script, I manually downloaded and extracted the binary:
curl -fsSL https://github.com/block/goose/releases/download/stable/goose-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.bz2 -o goose.tar.bz2
tar -xjf goose.tar.bz2
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
mv goose ~/.local/bin/
2. Config file structure matters
Goose uses config.yaml with environment variables at the root level:
GOOSE_PROVIDER: "openrouter"
GOOSE_MODEL: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4"
keyring: false
extensions:
developer:
bundled: true
enabled: true
name: developer
timeout: 300
type: builtin
The keyring: false is critical for CI environments.
4. Bash quoting issues
Complex prompts with nested quotes in bash? No dice. Write the prompt to a temp file instead and use the -i (instruction) flag:
cat > /tmp/prompt.txt << 'PROMPT_EOF'
Create a Python script called generate_fortune.py...
PROMPT_EOF
goose run --no-session -i /tmp/prompt.txt
3. Suppress the noise
Goose is chatty. Redirecting output keeps the logs clean:
goose run --no-session -i /tmp/prompt.txt > /dev/null 2>&1
The Final Setup
The workflow now:
- Installs Goose manually
- Configures it for OpenRouter
- Picks a random mood (sarcastic, wise, introspective, grumpy, or poetic)
- Asks Goose to create/run a Python script that generates the fortune
- Commits and pushes the updated README
What's Next
Not sure how far I'll get in the Advent of AI 2025, but we'll see. 👀
You can follow along with my Advent of AI challenge or hit me up on DEV.to with your own AI experiments!
If you want to stay in touch, all my socials are on nickyt.online.
Until the next one!
Photo by Jordyn St. John on Unsplash
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