Follower Change

What this action does ?

Get GitHub follower change event, i.e. when a user follows or unfollows you.

It is not realtime, since GitHub does not provide 'follow' events.

So you may run it periodically as a cron job.

Refer to detailed explanation for how it works.

My own working example:

name: follower notifier
on:
  # notify me daily
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 3 * * *' # in UTC time
jobs:
  main:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: get follower change
        id: followerChange
        uses: Sorosliu1029/follower-change@v2
        with:
          myToken: ${{ secrets.MY_TOKEN }}
          notifyUnFollowEvent: true
      - name: email me
        uses: dawidd6/action-send-mail@v3
        if: steps.followerChange.outputs.shouldNotify == 'true'
        with:
          server_address: smtp.qq.com
          server_port: 465
          username: ${{ secrets.MAIL_USERNAME }}
          password: ${{ secrets.MAIL_PASSWORD }}
          subject: GitHub Follower Change
          from: Follower Change Notifier
          to: ${{ secrets.TO_EMAIL_ADDRESS }}
          # use html file from previous step as email body
          html_body: file://${{ steps.followerChange.outputs.htmlFilePath }}

Input and output of this action

• input:
  • myToken: GitHub personal access token with at least 'read:user' and 'repo' scope. ⚠️ You should store this token as secret. This input is required.
  • notifyUnFollowEvent: should notify unfollow event or not. This input is optional, default is false.
• output:
  • changed: bool, whether follower changed or not.
  • shouldNotify: bool, should trigger following steps. Skip notification when no change or first run.
  • htmlFilePath: string, path of html file for follower change info
  • markdown: string, markdown for follower change info
  • plainText: string, plain text for follower change info

Secrets

The only required secret is MY_TOKEN, which is used as input myToken for this action.

You should store your secret at https://github.com/{YOUR_NAME}/{YOUR_REPO}/settings/secrets/actions, refer to creating encrypted secrets for a repository for more details.

For step 'email me', You could refer to Send mail Github Action

How it works ?

• Use GitHub GraphQL API to get all current followers
• Download previous snapshotted followers from GitHub Action artifact
• Compare current followers with previous followers to get follow and unfollow events
• Upload current followers as new snapshot to GitHub Action artifact

HTML output

HTML is generated by follower-change-email