Remove git files/directories older than x days via GitHub Action - bash

Question

We use a gh-pages branch in our repository to host a static website and frequently commit new information to this branch. Those files often get stale, as we push to a subdirectory per feature branch in the same repository.
The directory structure in my gh-pages branch is similar to the following:
.
|-- README.md
|-- JIRA-1234-feature
| `-- graph
|-- JIRA-4567-bugfix
| `-- graph
|-- JIRA-7890-branch-name
| `-- testing
I want to remove directories via a GitHub actions for which the last update was more than 5 days ago.
I naively tried to remove them via find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} ;, but the operating system obviously uses the clone date as the last modified time.
I also found
git ls-tree -r --name-only HEAD | while read filename; do
echo "$(git log -1 --format="%ad" --date="short" -- $filename) $filename"
done
which prints the last git update and the file name like this:
2023-01-12 JIRA-1234-test/index.html
2023-01-12 JIRA-1234-test/static/test.css
I don't know how to trigger file removal commands from this list, though.
How would I have to modify the following action to remove the old files?
name: Prune GH Pages branch
on:
workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
upload:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
timeout-minutes: 15
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout#v3
with:
ref: gh-pages
- name: Cleanup
run: |
# TODO: REMOVE FILES HERE
git ls-tree -r --name-only HEAD | while read filename; do
echo "$(git log -1 --format="%ad" --date="short" -- $filename) $filename"
done
- name: Commit & Push
run: |
if [ $(git status --porcelain | wc -l) -eq "0" ]; then
echo "git repo is clean."
else
git add -A
git commit -m "branch cleanup"
git push
fi

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to make a nice one-liner for the requirement. We need the following bash script. I have commented all the important steps.
#!/bin/bash
# Validate if $1 is a positive number days
[[ $1 != +([[:digit:]]) ]] &&
echo "$1: The script has to be run with positive number argument" && exit 1
# Get the X days ago timestamp
X_DAYS_AGO_TIMESTAMP=$(date -d "$1 days ago" +%s)
# Iterate over all files in the repository
for file in $(git ls-files); do
echo -n "."
# Get the timestamp of the last commit that modified this file
LAST_MODIFIED_TIMESTAMP=$(git log -1 --format="%at" -- "$file")
# If the file hasn't been modified within the last $1 days
if [ "$LAST_MODIFIED_TIMESTAMP" -lt "$X_DAYS_AGO_TIMESTAMP" ]; then
# Remove the file from the repository
echo -e "\nRemoving $file last modified at $(date -d "#$LAST_MODIFIED_TIMESTAMP")"
git rm --quiet "$file"
fi
done
# Commit the changes (if any)
if ! git diff --exit-code --quiet --staged; then
git commit -m "Remove files not modified within the last $1 days"
else
echo "No files removed"
fi
I can elaborate if something is not clear enough.