Discussion Exporter

A GitHub Action that fetches your repository's Discussions via the GraphQL API and exports each one as a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter.

Usage

- uses: RehabAbotalep/discussion-exporter@v1
  with:
    token: ${{ secrets.GH_PAT }}

Inputs

Input	Description	Required	Default
token	GitHub token with read:discussion permission. A fine-grained PAT is recommended.	Yes	—
output-dir	Directory to write Markdown files into.	No	docs
limit	Maximum number of discussions to fetch. Pagination is used automatically when the value exceeds 100.	No	100
repository	Target repository in owner/name format.	No	Current repository

Outputs

Output	Description
files-written	Number of Markdown files written.

Example workflow

name: Discussion Exporter

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  export-discussions:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Export discussions
        uses: RehabAbotalep/discussion-exporter@v1
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GH_PAT }}
          output-dir: docs
          limit: 100

      - name: Commit and push exported files
        run: |
          git config user.name "github-actions"
          git config user.email "github-actions@github.com"
          git add docs/
          git diff --cached --quiet || git commit -m "Export discussions to Markdown"
          git push

Output file format

Each discussion is saved as {output-dir}/{number}-{slug}.md with YAML frontmatter:

---
number: 42
title: "My Discussion Title"
author: octocat
category: Q&A
url: https://github.com/owner/repo/discussions/42
created: 2025-01-15
updated: 2025-03-01
---

Discussion body content here...

Prerequisites

• The token must have read:discussion permission on the target repository. The default GITHUB_TOKEN does not include this — a fine-grained PAT is recommended.
• The workflow must have contents: write permission to commit and push exported files.
• gh CLI and jq must be available on the runner. Both are pre-installed on ubuntu-latest.