AI Crawl Daily Update workflow (Barabama/FreeNodes)

The AI Crawl Daily Update workflow from Barabama/FreeNodes, explained and optimized by Latchkey.

CI health: C - fair

Point runs-on at Latchkey and get caching, job timeouts, self-healing for flaky steps, and up to 58% lower cost, applied automatically.

Grade your own workflow free or run it on Latchkey →

Source: Barabama/FreeNodes.github/workflows/crawl.ymlLicense MITView source

What it does

This is the AI Crawl Daily Update workflow from the Barabama/FreeNodes repository, a real project running GitHub Actions. It is shown here with attribution under its MIT license.

Below, Latchkey shows a faster, safer version produced by its optimization engine.

The workflow

workflow (.yml)

name: AI Crawl Daily Update

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 4 * * *"   # daily at 12:00 Beijing time (UTC 04:00)
  workflow_dispatch:       # manual trigger

jobs:
  crawl:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          ref: feat/ai-crawler-v2

      - name: Setup Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: "3.12"

      - name: Install project
        run: |
          pip install -e .
          pip install playwright
          playwright install --with-deps chromium

      - name: Run crawler
        env:
          OPENROUTER_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.OPENROUTER_API_KEY }}
          CEREBRAS_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.CEREBRAS_API_KEY }}
          OPENCODE_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.OPENCODE_API_KEY }}
        run: python main.py

      - name: Commit output
        run: |
          git config user.name "github-actions[bot]"
          git config user.email "github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
          # Force-add files that may be gitignored (nodes/) or newly generated
          git add --force nodes/*.txt nodes/*.yaml config.yaml README.md
          # Only commit if there are changes
          if git diff --cached --quiet; then
            echo "No changes to commit"
          else
            git commit -m "auto: daily crawl update"
            git push
          fi

The same workflow, on Latchkey

Estimated ~20% faster on cache hits, plus fewer wasted runs and a safer supply chain. Added and changed lines are highlighted.

name: AI Crawl Daily Update
 
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 4 * * *"   # daily at 12:00 Beijing time (UTC 04:00)
  workflow_dispatch:       # manual trigger
 
jobs:
  crawl:
    timeout-minutes: 30
    runs-on: latchkey-small
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          ref: feat/ai-crawler-v2
 
      - name: Setup Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          cache: 'pip'
          python-version: "3.12"
 
      - name: Install project
        run: |
          pip install -e .
          pip install playwright
          playwright install --with-deps chromium
 
      - name: Run crawler
        env:
          OPENROUTER_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.OPENROUTER_API_KEY }}
          CEREBRAS_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.CEREBRAS_API_KEY }}
          OPENCODE_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.OPENCODE_API_KEY }}
        run: python main.py
 
      - name: Commit output
        run: |
          git config user.name "github-actions[bot]"
          git config user.email "github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
          # Force-add files that may be gitignored (nodes/) or newly generated
          git add --force nodes/*.txt nodes/*.yaml config.yaml README.md
          # Only commit if there are changes
          if git diff --cached --quiet; then
            echo "No changes to commit"
          else
            git commit -m "auto: daily crawl update"
            git push
          fi

What changed

Run on Latchkey managed runners with one line (runs-on), which apply the fixes below automatically and self-heal transient failures. This example uses latchkey-small; pick the runner size that fits the job.
Cache dependency installs on the setup step so they are served from cache.
Add a job timeout so a hung step cannot burn hours of runner time.

What Latchkey heals here

This workflow has steps that commonly fail on transient issues (network, registries, flaky browsers). On Latchkey managed runners they are detected, retried, and self-healed instead of failing your build:

Dependency installs
End-to-end and browser tests

This workflow runs 1 job per trigger. On Latchkey the same minutes cost up to 58% less than GitHub-hosted, with zero queue time.

Actions used in this workflow

actions/checkout actions/setup-python