I have a [[gitscraper]] project, which is a project that uses github workflows to regularly scrape a website, and commit any changes to the git repo automatically, which was inspired by a post on hn.
In my case, I use it to monitor the epic game store for new games, and make a commit any time a new game is detected.
However, even though my git scraping project would detect the changes and commit them, I found that I’d still miss these updates .
So, the easiest alert I thought of would be… to send myself an email. But could I do this inside the github workflow?
Yes, I could. I found this article which helped give me the solution.
First, inside the workflow, a mail.txt needs to be assembled:
echo 'From: "Aaron" <aaronkelly@fastmail.com>' > [mail.txt](http://localhost:8080/s?path=mail.txt&project=gitscraper)
echo 'To: "Aaron" <aaronkelly@fastmail.com>' >> [mail.txt](http://localhost:8080/s?path=mail.txt&project=gitscraper)
echo 'Subject: New epic games bruh' >> [mail.txt](http://localhost:8080/s?path=mail.txt&project=gitscraper)
echo '' >> [mail.txt](http://localhost:8080/s?path=mail.txt&project=gitscraper)
echo '[https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/free-games'](https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/free-games') >> [mail.txt](http://localhost:8080/s?path=mail.txt&project=gitscraper)
And then the mail.txt could be sent to my email address using some specific CURL commands:
curl --url 'smtp://[smtp.fastmail.com](http://localhost:8080/s?path=smtp.fastmail.com&project=gitscraper):587' \
--mail-from 'aaronkelly@fastmail.com' \
--mail-rcpt 'aaronkelly@fastmail.com' \
--user 'aaronkelly@fastmail.com:<APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD>' \
--ssl-reqd \
--upload-file mail.txt
In my case, I’m using values that are particular to Fastmail, and also a Third-party apps password which I generated on Fastmail.
[[CURL]]