latex-action VS action-gh-release

The main purpose of this template is not to automate the compilation process, as you've said it would be too slow, and there are tools that provides this service, if needed, such as Cheng Xu's latex-action. It provides an automation for creating milestones in your LaTeX project. For example, you have completed an iteration of the project, say v01, you tag the last commit and push to GitHub remote. That state of the project is saved as a release, and the PDF file generated from those source files are also added to that release.

While those actions are indeeded archived, they do recommend some other community actions to use. I have used https://github.com/softprops/action-gh-release and it works well. That said, you need to do your own due diligence on how comfortable you are using community actions.

Create a new workflow, and then enter the code below. This code will create the PDF version of the latex file with every push into this repository. Each push will create a new release of your resume's latest iteration, and it will be an artifact attached to this. You may encounter an error based off the permission of the GitHub Action but this issue is explained well in this post.

Alternatively, if you do not want to use the LaTeX compilation process on GitHub Actions, you can omit the building process and track the locally generated PDF file as well. Usually binary files, PDF files in this case, are not tracked. You can remove the Compile LaTeX Document step in the .github/workflows/release.yml file, and start tracking the output PDF in your repository. By this way, you can move the compilation process to local. However, if you follow this path, by default, you will not have your output PDF listed under releases. It is possible to achieve this by editing the Release step in the workflow (see action-gh-release for more information).

I use https://github.com/softprops/action-gh-release to create releases when pull requests happen. But I don't understand how I'm supposed to set tags. The README states this: yml if: startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/')

action-gh-release really makes it easy to do these steps.

softprops/action-gh-release able to achieve that in two lines of code.

Finally, we use a 3rd-party release creation Action for creating a release draft with the release notes and artifacts we just created: