Three scheduled GitHub Actions turn real daily maintenance into commits that legitimately count as my own contributions — no empty commits required.
The aim was simple to state and easy to get wrong: make the GitHub contribution graph show daily activity, without sitting down to code every single day. The constraint that matters is what makes it legitimate — every commit still has to contain a real change. Nothing manufactured just to paint a square green.
GitHub Actions runs commands on GitHub’s own servers, on a timer — your machine never has to be on. Each workflow lives in .github/workflows/*.yml and is built from three pieces:
| Workflow | Does | Touches |
|---|---|---|
| daily-content.yml | Rotates the quote of the day and featured testimonial | daily-content.js |
| sitemap.yml | Refreshes lastmod dates in the sitemap | sitemap.xml |
| link-check.yml | Verifies every link and image still resolves | link-check.md |
This is the line that keeps the whole thing legitimate. Every workflow runs the same guard before it’s allowed to commit:
if git diff —cached —quiet; then
echo “No changes to commit.”
else
git commit -m “chore: refresh quote of the day ($(date -u +%F))”
git push
figit diff —cached —quiet asks one question: did anything actually change? If nothing did, the job prints a line and stops — no commit, no push, no square. The green squares that do appear are a side effect of real maintenance, not the point of it.
Left alone, a workflow’s commit is authored by github-actions[bot] — which GitHub does not count on a profile. The fix is telling git who’s really “writing” the commit:
env:
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME: {{ secrets.DAILY_COMMIT_NAME }}
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL: {{ secrets.DAILY_COMMIT_EMAIL }}The email has to match a verified address on the GitHub account. That single match is what routes the commit into the profile’s graph instead of the bot’s.
GitHub’s scheduler gets congested right at :00 and :30, so each job’s cron is nudged a few minutes past. The order is deliberate too — content first, so the sitemap’s “last modified” reflects that day’s real change, then the link check last.