Photo by Andrey Larin on Unsplash

Hey there 👋

For this Hackathon, my inspiration was GitHub's Release Radar, a place where I discovered a lot of interesting projects. I'm glad that it's back and I think it's an excellent resource for the community so I wanted to replicate that.

Using GitHub as a platform for this enables all of Git's features like version control, and more importantly, collaboration so anyone can curate what goes inside the newsletter through a Pull Request.

The GitHub Action uses SendGrid to send emails and keep track of all the subscribers and it's easily adaptable to launch your own newsletter!

Just create a repo, edit the README and follow the instructions:

My Workflow

Set up

You will need a SendGrid account and have completed these steps:

• Set Up Domain Authentication
• Create Full Access API Key

Add the generated API Key as a secret named SENDGRID_API_KEY in your repo settings.

It should look like this:

• Create Signup Forms

Once you create it, go to Contacts and open the list that was created automatically, to view it's ID open the list and check the URL, the ID will look like this: 81f44a3f-f1c2-4f47-a9a9-df79dd32d246. This will be your list_id.

• Create Unsubscribe Group

Once you create it, you will be able to see it's ID, it will look like this: 22584. This will be your suppression_group_id.

• Add a Sender

Once you create it, click the 3 dots in the right of the Sender Management page and Edit the entry, check the URL and you will find a number that looks like this: 1057550. This will be your sender_id.

Inputs

All inputs are REQUIRED

Example usage

name: Newsletter
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      subject:
        description: 'Subject'
        required: true

jobs:
  newsletter:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Send newsletter
    steps:
    - name: Send newsletter
      uses: KNawm/newsletter-action@v1
      env:
        SENDGRID_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.SENDGRID_API_KEY }}
      with:
        subject: ${{ github.event.inputs.subject }}
        list_id: '81f44a3f-f1c2-4f47-a9a9-df79dd32d246'
        suppression_group_id: 22584
        sender_id: 1057550

Demo: KNawm/release-radar

You need to trigger the workflow manually going to the Actions page of your repo and provide a subject line.

Once it's triggered it will send the content of your README to your list of recipients after 5 minutes.

If it's working you can enter here and you should see your email scheduled:

Submission Category:

Wacky Wildcards

Link to Code and Demo