How to Set Up GitHub Contribution Snake Animation Workflow

What is the Contribution Snake Animation?

Created by Platane, snk (Snake Generator) is a GitHub Action that reads your GitHub contribution graph history and generates an animated vector SVG where a snake eats your green contribution squares like the classic arcade game.

Because GitHub contribution graphs update daily, setting up a scheduled GitHub Action allows your snake animation to update automatically every 24 hours without any manual effort.

Step 1: Create the GitHub Actions Workflow File

In your special profile repository (e.g. github.com/username/username), create a file at the path .github/workflows/snake.yml with the following content:

name: generate animation

on:
  # run automatically every 24 hours
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 0 * * *" 
  
  # allows to manually run the Job at any time
  workflow_dispatch:
  
  # run on every push on the main branch
  push:
    branches:
    - main

jobs:
  generate:
    permissions: 
      contents: write
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 5
    
    steps:
      # generates a snake game from a github user (<github_user_name>) contributions graph, output a svg animation at <svg_out_path>
      - name: generate github-contribution-grid-snake.svg
        uses: Platane/snk/svg-only@v3
        with:
          github_user_name: ${{ github.repository_owner }}
          outputs: |
            dist/github-contribution-grid-snake.svg
            dist/github-contribution-grid-snake-dark.svg?palette=github-dark
          
      # push the content of <build_dir> to a branch
      # the content will be available at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<github_user>/<repository>/<target_branch>/<file> , or as github page
      - name: push github-contribution-grid-snake.svg to the output branch
        uses: crazy-max/ghaction-github-pages@v3.1.0
        with:
          target_branch: output
          build_dir: dist
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Step 2: Enable Workflow Permissions

Go to your profile repository on GitHub and click Settings.
In the left sidebar, expand Actions and click General.
Scroll down to Workflow permissions and select Read and write permissions.
Click Save.

Step 3: Trigger the First Workflow Run

Go to the Actions tab in your repository, select generate animation under Workflows, click Run workflow, and hit the green button. Once completed, a new output branch will be created containing your snake SVG file.

Step 4: Embed the Snake SVG in Your README

Add the following Markdown image tag to your README.md file (replace yourusername with your GitHub handle):

![Snake Animation](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourusername/yourusername/output/github-contribution-grid-snake-dark.svg)

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