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:

  1. Use GitFx to run code, and store output to a route.
  2. 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!