This GitHub Action will handle authenticated API requests for you, allowing you to save the data from the request into your workspace as an environment variable and a file. Using this action will allow you to save data from these queries on a schedule so they can be used in a static page without exposing your API credentials. You can read more about the inspiration for this action here.

Maintenance of this project is made possible by all the contributors and sponsors. If you'd like to sponsor this project and have your avatar or company logo appear below click here. 💖

You can include the action in your workflow to trigger on any event that GitHub actions supports. You'll need to provide the action with the endpoint you'd like to request along with any configuration options as stringified JSON.

name: Refresh Feed
on: [push]
jobs:
  refresh-feed:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Fetch API Data 📦
        uses: JamesIves/fetch-api-data-action@v2
        with:
          endpoint: https://example.com
          configuration: '{ "method": "GET", "headers": {"Authorization": "Bearer ${{ secrets.API_TOKEN }}"} }'

Once the action has run the requested data will be exported into the fetch-api-data environment variable and will also be available as a .json file in your workspace located by default in the fetch-api-data-action/data.json directory. If you need something other than .json file please refer to the format parameter.

You can combine the use of this with the GitHub Pages Deploy Action to trigger scheduled updates to a feed on your website.

name: Refresh Feed
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: 10 15 * * 0-6
permissions:
  contents: write
jobs:
  refresh-feed:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout 🛎️
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          persist-credentials: false

      - name: Fetch API Data 📦
        uses: JamesIves/fetch-api-data-action@v2
        with:
          endpoint: https://example.com
          configuration: '{ "method": "GET", "headers": {"Authorization": "Bearer ${{ secrets.API_TOKEN }}"} }'

      - name: Build and Deploy 🚀
        uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4
        with:
          branch: main # Pushes the updates to the main branch.
          folder: fetch-api-data-action # The location of the data.json file saved by the Fetch API Data action.
          target-folder: data # Saves the data into the 'data' directory on the main branch.

name: Build and Deploy
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: 10 16 * * 0-6
permissions:
  contents: write
jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout 🛎️
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          persist-credentials: false

      - name: Install 🔧
        run: |
          npm install
          npm run-script build

      - name: Build and Deploy 🚀
        uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4
        with:
          branch: gh-pages
          folder: build

If you'd like to use the functionality provided by this action in your own action you can either create a composite action, or you can install it using yarn or npm by running the following commands. It's available on both the npm and GitHub registry.

yarn add @jamesives/fetch-api-data-action

It can then be imported into your project like so.

import run, {
  retrieveData,
  generateExport,
  ActionInterface
} from '@jamesives/fetch-api-data-action'

Calling the functions directly will require you to pass in an object containing the variables found in the configuration section.

import run from '@jamesives/fetch-api-data-action'

run({
  endpoint: 'https://example.com',
  configuration: JSON.stringify({
    method: 'GET',
    headers: {Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env['TOKEN']}`}
  })
})

The with portion of the workflow must be configured before the action will work. You can add these in the with section found in the examples above. Any secrets must be referenced using the bracket syntax and stored in the GitHub repositories Settings/Secrets menu. You can learn more about setting environment variables with GitHub actions here.

The following configuration options should be set.

If you need to make a request to another endpoint in order to request an access token or something similar you can do so using the token-endpoint and token-configuration parameters. You can then use the returned token in your configuration variable using the triple syntax like so {{{ tokens.access_token }}}. You can find an example of this below.

name: Refresh Feed
on: [push]
jobs:
  refresh-feed:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Fetch API Data 📦
        uses: JamesIves/fetch-api-data-action@v2
        with:
          # The token endpoint is requested first. This retrieves the access token for the other endpoint.
          token-endpoint: https://example.com/auth/token
          # The configuration contains secrets held in the Settings/Secrets menu of the repository.
          token-configuration: '{ "method": "POST", "body": {"client_id": "${{ secrets.client_id }}", "client_secret": "${{ secrets.client_secret }}"} }'
          # Once the token endpoint has fetched then this endpoint is requested.
          endpoint: https://example.com/data
          # The bearer token here is returned from the TOKEN_ENDPOINT call. The returned data looks like so: {data: {access_token: '123'}}, meaning it can be accessed using the triple bracket syntax.
          configuration: '{ "method": "GET", "headers": {"Authorization": "Bearer {{{ data.access_token }}}"} }'