Featured actions from the GitHub Actions Hackathon

A huge thanks to everyone who participated in the GitHub Actions Hackathon. A few weeks ago, the hackathon kicked off with a bang. We took to online channels and live streamed the count down, walked through how to create Actions, and showed participants how to submit their own Actions. At that point, it was then up to the community to submit their Actions. The hackathon was completely online, and anyone around the world could participate.

Over four weeks, streams of submissions poured in. There were Actions for checking if websites were online, Actions for submitting a Reddit thread about your release, and even an Action to recognise your contributions by posting a plant emoji in Slack! The variety, creativity, and innovation of automations was incredible to see, especially during this difficult time.

We had hundreds of submissions, each one a unique Action. And the best thing about all these Actions, is that they’re open source. This means you can download, clone, fork, and use any of the submissions.

Check out some of the featured submissions

Featured Actions

While every action was new and creative, we wanted to showcase a few of our favourites. With over 700 submissions, it was definitely tough to narrow down the ones we loved.

Action Cats

Action Cats is a simple GitHub Action which comments on your pull requests. If you push out code, then a cat gif appears on your pull request to reward you. It’s such a creative, novelty Action to encourage you and other developers to make regular pull requests. See how many different cat gifs appear on your pull requests!

Check out Action Cats from @ruairidhwm.

Actions Label Commenter

Have you ever wanted to automatically add a label based on a templated message? Now you can with Actions Label Commenter. This Action allows you to automatically add labels, close or reopen issues, and manage pull requests.

Make your issues work better for you with Actions Label Commenter from peaceiris.

Actions Comment Run

Wouldn’t it be nice if your issues said hello to you once in a while? Or your issues commented back with relevant information? Actions Comment Run allows you to run any script in a GitHub issue comment. Program your bot to say “hello, world”, post an image or gif, add links, run a command, and more. There’s a whole list of input variables available for your needs.

Check out Actions Comment Run and give it a go thanks to nwtgck.

Misspell Fixer

Spelling… the bane of all coders! Our web browsers can pick up spelling errors, so why can’t our code? Misspell Fixer automatically fixes typos and mistakes in your source code and docs. It’s simple and easy to use and hopefully it saves you from code errors AND a massive headache.

Automatically fix typos with Misspell Fixer from sobolevn.

TODO to Issue

Ever write an entire to-do list, and then realize each item requires a lot more work than one bullet point? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you could say, “this is bigger than I thought” and have it automatically convert to an issue? TODO to Issue lets you do just that. It converts your #TODO comments to GitHub issues when a new comment is added.

Get the TODO to Issue Action to empower you and your projects, thanks to alstr.

Thank you

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the GitHub Actions Hackathon. We’re working hard to ship out SWAG packs to everyone who submitted an eligible Action. We hope you enjoyed the GitHub Actions Hackathon and we hope to see you join in another online hackathon in future.

All future GitHub Hackathons will be posted on the GitHub Hackathon website. Stay tuned for more hackathons and check out our social media for the next exciting hack!

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Written by

Michelle Mannering

@MishManners

I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.