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Add GitHub workflow, cron-based to update driverless (AirPrint, IPP Everywhere) printer list #229
Description
See issue #223, starting with this comment to the end.
@michaelrsweet said:
The current scripts merge the AirPrint and IPP Everywhere lists. Mopria does not provide a public list of printers (unfortunately), but the number of Mopria-ready printers that are not AirPrint or IPP Everywhere is probably close to (if not) 0.
I ran my scripts manually this time. I normally have them setup to run on one of my development systems once a month since the lists don't change that often. I don't think we could do this via GitHub CI directly - maybe we could create a PR but I'm not sure. The scripts can certainly be run from CI, it is just how to generate the PR with the changes? (I know I probably don't have the time to make that work right now, maybe later...)
... and to follow up on this, apparently there is a GitHub action for this. So it is possible we can do it fairly easily, but again I don't have time to write it up today...
From a clone of the repository:
cd driverless ./update-printer-list.shThe updated "public/assets/json/driverless.json" file is then ready to be committed and/or turned into a PR.
The script uses curl and python, with the python sys and json modules/libraries (in case they are not in the default CI running image...)
For generating PRs also have a look at the workflows for update and versioning automation in the CUPS Snap repo.
@rudra-iitm @gativarshney @rkt0209 could somebody of you have a look?
Activity
hissamshar commentedon Aug 18, 2026
I've looked into this, including the full thread on #223. If nobody's already on it, I'm happy to put together a PR. Here's my plan:
Approach: add a new .github/workflows/update-driverless.yml that runs driverless/update-printer-list.sh on a schedule and opens a PR via peter-evans/create-pull-request@v8. Nothing extra needs installing: curl and python3 are already on ubuntu-latest (the script falls back to python3 when python is absent), and the Python helpers only use sys/json.
Schedule: monthly, cron: '0 6 1 * *' (1st of the month, 06:00 UTC), plus workflow_dispatch for manual runs. This matches how often the list is refreshed today.
PR vs direct commit: going with a PR so changes get reviewed before deploy. I'll use the default GITHUB_TOKEN with permissions: { contents: write, pull-requests: write }, so no secret to provision. The one trade-off: a PR opened with GITHUB_TOKEN won't trigger the build.yml PR workflow, so the auto-PR won't show CI status. That's fine here because driverless.json is a static asset that build.yml doesn't validate (it's just copied into the build output), and the merge to master still triggers the Pages deploy.
Safety guard: #223 happened after the update script broke (the script went missing and Apple's portal changed), which emptied the list. To make sure a failure can't silently wipe it again, I'll add a validation step that parses the JSON and asserts a plausible entry count before creating the PR. If the upstream fetch fails or the list comes back empty, the workflow stops and no PR is opened.
I'll use cups-snap's auto-update.yml as the reference pattern, as suggested. Happy to adjust the approach if you'd like anything different
michaelrsweet commentedon Aug 18, 2026
@hissamshar That all sounds perfect, thanks!
tillkamppeter commentedon Aug 18, 2026
All OK with me, please go ahead, @hissamshar .
Add cron workflow to update driverless printer list (OpenPrinting#229)