Let's have some fun with the yearly contribution display of a github user.
The result can be viewed on this page, but you have to go back to 2020.
To run it you need some cronjob running your script. On my UNIX-machine I edited the crontab using the command
crontab -e
and placed the content
54 0 * * * cd /src/contribution-pixel-messages/ && node index.js
which tells the scheduler to run the script on 00:54 each day.
It is important to have the git executable on the path and to have a ssh-key in place such that you do not need to enter your credentials.
At the moment append.sh is executed to modify the file the_file.txt and append a dot. This makes the assumption that we are running on a Unixoid system. It could be changed to some fs commands in the future to support other operating systems.
There is also a frontend that can be used to create plan.json suiting your needs. It can be used statically here in this live demo.
Replace the plan.json with the downloaded plan. You can select all the pixels on which a commit is posted to github.
To run and build it locally use
parcel index.html
In case you do not have a global installation of parceljs you can install it using:
npm install -g parcel-bundler
In this case visit https://localhost:1234 to see the pixels generator.