Problem solver for GitHub Workflow

I wanted to create a GitHub workflow that did web API query and return the results as text files in the repo. Here are several problems I’ve solved during the development.

Passing keys and tokens via secrets to the web API

Several tokens and secrets are necessary to query the web API. I stored that as GitHub secrets and access them in the workflow file via:

jobs:
  job-name:
    environment: query_env
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: ...
    steps:
      ...
      - name: Query API
        id: query_api
        env:
          oauthtoken: ${{ secrets.OAUTH_TOKEN }}
          oauthtokensecret: ${{ secrets.OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET }}
        run: python run_script.py $oauthtoken $oauthtokensecret
        ...

After running run_script.py, there will be several .txt files produced in the directory data_dir/ inside the repository which I want to push to the GitHub repository. I tried committing and pushing the files with actions/checkout@v4 but it does not work:

      ...
      - name: add files to git # Below is a version that does not work
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
           token: ${{ secrets.REPO_TOKEN }}
      - name: do the actual push
        run: |
          git add data_dir/*.txt
          git commit -m "add files"
          git push

Running this, I receive an error: nothing to commit, working tree clean. Error: Process completed with exit code 1. .

The version that works eventually looks like this:

      - name: Commit files
        uses: stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action@v5
        with:
           token: ${{ secrets.REPO_TOKEN }}

Note that it would commit all files produced to the repository, including some unwanted cached files. Therefore, I included a step before this to clean up the files:

      - name: Remove temp files
        run: |
          [ -d "package_dir/__pycache__" ] && rm -r package_dir/__pycache__