This action identifies forks that have commits ahead of the base repository, and sends a notification email if any of those commits were after the last run of this action.

The date of the last seen downstream commit is stored in the ACTION_NOTIFY_DOWNSTREAM_FORKS repository variable. This is used to ensure that emails are only sent when new commits have been detected.

Before using this workflow, ensure:

• A fine-grained Personal Access Token (PAT) has been created with the following permissions:
  • Contents: Read-only
  • Metadata: Read-only
  • Variables: Read and write
• Repository secrets have been created for:
  • The PAT (e.g. PAT_NOTIFY_FORKS)
  • The SMTP email server and credentials (e.g. EMAIL_SMTP_URL) in either smtp://user:password@server:port or smtp+starttls://user:password@server:port format
  • The recipient email addresses (e.g. EMAIL_TO)

Various inputs are defined in the action to configure its operation:

Create a workflow that performs a daily check for new commits to downstream forks.

name: Downstream Fork Notification
permissions: {}

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    # Runs at 09:00 UTC daily
    # Stagger different repos to avoid hitting GitHub API rate limits
    - cron: '0 9 * * *'

jobs:
  downstream-forks:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Notify of new commits to downstream forks
      uses: thoukydides/action-notify-downstream-forks@v1
      with:
        email_smtp_url: ${{ secrets.EMAIL_SMTP_URL }}
        email_to: ${{ secrets.EMAIL_TO }}
        github_token: ${{ secrets.PAT_NOTIFY_FORKS }}