If you are reading this post, it means it worked! I scheduled this post yesterday to automatically publish at 9am the next day, PDT.

I’ve been trying to find a solution for this a few times, but most recently realized that with the AWS Lamdba functions it might have finally become possible to do this without managing a whole server.

I got some inspiration from Alex Learns Programming, which made me realize Github has a simple API to trigger a new page build.

You need a few more things:

1. Create a Personal Access Token on GitHub.
2. Make sure you give it at least the repo and user privileges.
3. Make sure you add future: false to your _config.yaml.
4. Write a blog post, and set the date to some point in the future.
5. Create an AWS Lambda function.

To automatically have a lamdba run on a specific schedule, you can use a ‘CloudWatch Event’.

Source

This is (most of the) code for the actual AWS lambda function:

const { TOKEN, USERNAME, REPO } = require('./config');
const fetch = require('node-fetch');

exports.handler = async (event) => {

  const url = 'https://api.github.com/repos/' + USERNAME + '/' + REPO + '/pages/builds';
  const result = await fetch(url, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Authorization': 'Token ' + TOKEN,
      'Accept': 'application/vnd.github.mister-fantastic-preview+json',
    }
  });

  if (!result.ok) {
    throw new Error('Failure to call github API. HTTP error code: ' + result.status);
  }

  console.log('Publish successful');
};

I released the full source on Github, it’s pretty universal. Just add your own configuration to config.js.

Cost

The Free Tier for AWS allows for 1,000,000 triggers per month, which is plenty (I’m triggering it every 15 minutes, which is less than 3000 triggers per month).

I configured it use 128M memory. The free tier includes 3,200,000 seconds per month at that memory limit. Since the script takes around 400ms to run, this is also more than plenty.

tl;dr: it’s free.

Conclusion

This was my first foray into AWS Lamdba Functions, and I was surpised how easy and fun it was.

Hope it’s useful to anyone else!

Updates

Cory Cox did a similar thing, but with Azure Functions instead of AWS. Read more in his article.