Possible to run as scheduled (cron) GitHub Action?

[joebowbeer]

I'm reading the docs and I naively wonder how much value GitOps Promoter is getting from its Kubernetes host cluster, and whether it could just as easily run as a scheduled GitHub Action.

If it runs in Kubernetes it needs to run in one of the clusters, which means one of the clusters will have write access to GitHub. This is something we have so far avoided.

On the other hand, as I understand it, GitOps Promoter's inputs and outputs are all on GitHub (*), so why not run it as a GitHub Action? What value is it receiving from Kubernetes?

I think it would be helpful to document how to deploy the promoter on GitHub or GitLab using packages or containers produced by this project.

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(*) I'm referring to the 3 jobs of the GitOps Promoter that were listed in one presentation at ArgoCon EU 2025

• Watch repo for manifests
• Automatically open PRs
• Merge PR when Git statuses clear

[crenshaw-dev]

You could definitely implement a GitOps-Promoter-like experience using only the SCM's workflow tooling (for example, GitHub Actions). That's one of the things I like most about the GitOps Promoter design: it's simple and relatively easily replicated.

Building this in a controller gets you all the benefits of a Kubernetes API:

1. Continuous reconciliation / eventual consistency (building retries into pipelines is notoriously difficult to get right)
2. Declarative config API: no need for your own DB to store config
3. Kubernetes RBAC, client code, ecosystem, etc.

Basically, Kubernetes is pretty sweet, so we built the system on Kubernetes.

Giving a Kubernetes workload git push access is understandably a point of concern. That's why we've designed GitOps Promoter to be deployable on its own cluster, so you can keep that access isolated.

All that said, if you build a similar system using an SCM's workflow tooling, I'd love to see a demo! Kubernetes has its advantages, but I see no reason why a really strong version of this system couldn't be built outside Kubernetes.