A self-updating open-data site with zero servers: GitHub Actions, Pages, and branches as a CDN

Short summary

Village Finder is a zero-cost static site serving interactive maps for 78,000+ Indian villages with daily-refreshed agricultural market data, using GitHub Pages for hosting, GitHub Actions for data pipelines, and transient Git branches as a CORS-enabled CDN. The architecture separates stable administrative data (PR-reviewed, version-controlled) from volatile daily data (force-pushed to history-less branches served via raw.githubusercontent.com). Edge cases around pathspecs, untracked diffs, and CI alert fatigue are handled with pragmatic patterns like EX_TEMPFAIL exit codes and composite actions.

• •Zero-cost serverless architecture using GitHub Pages, Actions, and transient branches as a data CDN
• •Two-tier data lifecycle: PR-reviewed stable data vs force-pushed volatile data on isolated branches
• •Practical CI/CD patterns including EX_TEMPFAIL for upstream API failures and composite actions for readability

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