github-of-life

Conway's Game of Life, animated on the GitHub contribution graph.

How it works

A Cloudflare Worker runs every minute, ticking GoL forward one generation and rewriting the commit history of this repo so the contribution graph reflects the current alive cells.

The repo is deleted and recreated on every tick so dead cells immediately disappear from the graph. Alive cells are written as dated commits; GitHub renders them as green squares.

At midnight UTC the board is reseeded with a fresh random pattern. On extinction it reseeds automatically.

Architecture

File	Purpose
worker.js	Cloudflare Worker — GoL logic, GitHub API writes, random reseed
wrangler.toml	Worker config and cron triggers
capture.js	Local script — renders GoL frames and assembles contribution-graph.gif

State

GoL state (generation + 52×7 boolean grid) is stored in a Cloudflare KV namespace. The main branch is force-pushed each tick to reflect the current pattern.

Setup

1. Create a Cloudflare Worker and KV namespace
2. Set secrets: GITHUB_TOKEN (PAT with repo + delete_repo scopes), GITHUB_USER
3. Seed initial KV state via npx wrangler secret put GITHUB_TOKEN
4. npx wrangler deploy