How to Trigger Workflows in GitHub Actions#

There are generally two ways to trigger workflows in GitHub Actions:

• Time-based triggers: For example, run a workflow on a weekly or daily schedule.
• Event-based triggers: For example, run a workflow new commit is pushed to the master branch or another workflow finishes.

Scheduled and Time-Based Runs#

The example below can be adjusted to run at different intervals. Simply adjust the cron job definition to your needs.

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name: Submit Sitemap URLs to IndexNow

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: 0 0 1 * *  # Run at midnight UTC on the 1st day of each month.

Monthly Schedule#

Run the workflow at midnight UTC on the first day of each month:

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    - cron: 0 0 1 * *

Weekly Schedule#

Run the workflow at midnight UTC on the first day of each week:

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    - cron: 0 0 * * 0

Daily Schedule#

Run the workflow at midnight UTC on a daily basis:

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    - cron: 0 0 * * *

Only Submit Latest Changes#

Rather than submitting all the URLs in the sitemap as one large payload to IndexNow, you can also submit only the latest changes by targeting the latest modification date of each URL in the sitemap using the <lastmod> tag. This is particularly useful if you have a large number of pages on your site that you want to submit all at once when deploying your site.

Simply adjust the sitemap_days_ago parameter to the desired number of days, as highlighted below:

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name: Submit Sitemap to IndexNow

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: 0 0 * * *  # Run daily at midnight UTC.

jobs:
  submit-sitemap:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Submit sitemap URLs to IndexNow
        uses: jakob-bagterp/index-now-submit-sitemap-urls-action@v1
        with:
          host: example.com
          api_key: ${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}
          api_key_location: https://example.com/${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}.txt
          endpoint: yandex
          sitemap_locations: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
          sitemap_days_ago: 1

Event-Triggered Workflows#

Imagine the sitemap is submitted before the site has been fully deployed. This is something we want to avoid, as otherwise we won't be using the most up-to-date sitemap.

There are several ways to trigger workflows in GitHub Actions. The most common options in this context are:

• Use needs when having several jobs in the same workflow file.
• Use workflow_run when you want to trigger jobs in different workflow files.

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on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ["My Deployment Workflow"]
    branches: [master]
    types: [completed]

GitHub Pages#

For users of GitHub Pages, esepecally if you're using MkDocs or another tool to build your site with GitHub Pages, you can use this workflow to automatically submit the sitemap to IndexNow.

All you need to do is adjust the on condition and adapt the example below to your needs:

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on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: [pages-build-deployment]
    types: [completed]