GitFx - Run Serverless in Git

Take a private repo as a service

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 11:20:30 +0000

Usually we need storage (of data), computing (power) and a service to serve a web application.

We have to buy all these from cloud providers such as Azure, GCP, AWS etc., but it’s easier for us to get these resources for free nowadays if you just do some personal projects.

GitHub does the best for it.

GitHub Actions for computing,
then store data in commits,
a GitHub Pages to serve

A GitHub action to create SSH keys

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 11:20:30 +0000

We need more key pairs than ever so I released a GitHub action to run ssh-keygen command and create key pairs.

You can create key pairs in web page securely just by clicking.

Quick start

Use the template to create a repo, better as a private repo for security
Go to Actions top menu page, follow the steps as below:

After one minute or two, you’ll see two files, private_key.txt and public_key.txt, are added/updated in repo’s root directory when the action finished successfully
Open each file and click Copy raw contents button on the top right to copy the key

Done!

在 Hugo 中使用 GitFx

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 12:26:51 +0000

GitFx 是我写的一个可以运行多种语言的代码片段的工具。同时提供了 ActionServerless 这个 action 方便在 GitHub 的 workflow 里运行 GitFx。之所以把它命名为 ActionServerless 这样的“热词”，除了蹭热度之外，你的确可以把用它实现的程序看作是一个 async 的 Serverless 应用。

使用 GitFx/ActionServerless 可以方便快速地为开发、测试创建一个静态资源的 API 服务。而且只需要把代码推到 GitHub 上就可以使用了。

我曾经想在博客中嵌入代码，同时通过一些服务去运行该代码，然后再把结果展示到文章里。可以使用 Docker 创建类似的功能，可以达到类似 Go playground 的那种效果。但是这对于个人博客不但有服务器开销，还会有安全问题。我们现在很多技术博客都是运行在 GitHub pages 上，所以用 GitFx 就方便多了：

使用 GitFx 运行代码，把运行的输出存到一个路径
对于 Hugo 的使用者，我们提供了一个 shortcode 插件可以很方便地把插入代码、展示运行结果变成一行代码

这样你就可以轻松地写技术博客了。下面我们通过一个 Hello world 的示例看下如何使用。

Hello world 示例

在 GitHub action 中运行 GitFx

在本例我们把代码放到根目录下的 ‘app’ 目录中。我们创建一个名为 hello.py 的源文件，写上一行简单的 print("Hello world!") 再加上一行用注释定义的存储输出的文件路径（具体写法可见下文的代码或参考 GitFx 的文档）。

然后我们需要创建一个 GitHub action workflow，其中和 GitFx 有关的部分配置如下：

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...
- uses: gitx-io/ActionServerless@master
with:
filepath: './app'
...

完整的配置可参考这里。

在 Hugo 博客中展示代码和结果

我们提供了一个 Hugo shortcode 的插件 hugo-gitfx 来展示 hello.py 和它的运行结果。你只需要在文章需要插入代码的地方写上：

{{< gitfx “app/hello.py” >}}

然后就会有下面这样的效果：

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# GET /app/hello_world
print("Hello world!")

Hello world!

如果你也恰好使用 Hugo 架设博客，也可以试一下哦！

Hugo with GitFx

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:26:51 +0000

I posted a message in HackerNews when I’d released ActionServerless(GitFx) early this year. And most of replies criticized that I’m abusing GitHub actions service. Then I emailed GitHub for their attitude, they replied that they don’t think that’s an abuse as so far.

GitFx can create a service for your developing, testing or learning with the convenience that GitHub actions provides as I know there’s no enough usage of it until now.

I ever thought to create a tool that can be embedded into tech blogs, to show code, run code and display output of code, just as golang playground does. It seems there’re a lot of such services at present. I ever created one with docker. But it’s a little bit heavy to run so many docker containers.

Now I have GitFx, I realize it’s really a nice solution:

Use GitFx to run code, and store output to a route.
Take Hugo as your blog framework for example, we provide a shortcode to show code and its output in your blogs.

You can create a vivid tutorial blog now! And of course I can’t wait to give you one for how to use GitFx with Hugo.

Hello world

Set up GitFx in action

We put our code in a folder under root directory, ‘app’ folder in our example. We create a source file named hello.py. We just code a print("Hello world!") into it with a GitFx route(a route is a line of comment to define a file path to store output of the code).

We need to set up a GitHub action workflow, the main part of configuration related with GitFx is:

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...
- uses: gitx-io/ActionServerless@master
with:
filepath: './app'
...

Here’s a workflow configuration example.

Show code in your Hugo blog

We use Hugo shortcode hugo-gitfx to show the content of hello.py and its output. What you need is just to write one line in your blog:

{{< gitfx “app/hello.py” >}}

The code and output showed below is the magic of it:

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# GET /app/hello_world
print("Hello world!")

Hello world!

You’re welcome to have a try if you’re a Hugo user!