📦 Open Source

Zero Dollars to Track Cattle Prices Forever: Git as a Temporal Database via GitHub Actions

Imagine scraping market data daily, storing every price tick immutably, all for free. One dev did it by hijacking Git itself as a database, with GitHub Actions as the engine.

Aisha Patel 📅 Apr 03, 2026 ⏱️ 4 min read 👁️ 0 views
Git commit graph showing daily cattle price snapshots in a GitHub repository

⚡ Key Takeaways

  • Transform GitHub repos into free temporal databases using daily commits from Actions workflows.
  • Key trick: permissions: contents: write unlocks writes without tokens.
  • Ideal for low-volume time-series like prices, sensors — scales to analysis via git tools.

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Aisha Patel
Written by

Aisha Patel

Former ML engineer turned writer. Covers computer vision and robotics with a practitioner perspective.

#GitHub Actions #git database #temporal data #zero-cost architecture

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Originally reported by dev.to

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