My Workflow

I wrote this workflow to keep a history of a latex document I was working on. I also wanted the document to be synced with my Google drive without me having to manually upload it every time I made a change.

Prerequisites

• A Google service account
• An encryption tool such as gpg
• Google drive file ID (The file must be shared with the email associated with the service account)

GitHub suggests using tools such as gpg to store large secrets. I used gpg to encrypt the json file for the service account and included the encrypted file in the repository. I saved the passphrase as a GitHub secret.

I also uploaded the first version of my pdf on to Google drive to get a file ID, which I saved as a GitHub secret, as well. I shared this file with the email associated with that service account.

Workflow Steps

1. Install texlive (latexmk included)
2. Compile and typeset the pdf document
3. Save the generated pdf as an artifact
4. Decrypt the encrypted service account JSON file
5. Install google-api-python-client python library
6. Upload the new version of the pdf onto Google Drive

Possible Improvements

This was my first experience with GitHub Actions so there is still room for improvement, for example:

• The steps 1, 4, and 5 only need be done once. Therefore, it is possible to use GitHub's cache action and generate the dependencies and cache them. Then on the consequent runs, the runner can use the cached version to improve speed.

• Also, I am looking to be able to get tlmgr working so that I can customize my LaTeX installation.

Update: I was able to use a docker image to get this working.

• As a next step, it may be possible to separate this workflow into two workflows: one for compiling and saving, and the other for uploading onto Google drive.

Update: I split these two into separate actions.

However, it should be good enough to get the job done.

Submission Category:

Wacky Wildcards

Link to Code

Additional Resources / Info

1. https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/service-accounts
2. https://github.com/actions/cache
3. https://docs.github.com/en/actions/configuring-and-managing-workflows/creating-and-storing-encrypted-secrets#limits-for-secrets
4. https://pypi.org/project/google-api-python-client