12 ms·

Run GitHub Actions locally

273 points by flashblaze 1y ago

cedws 1y ago
I've been using this recently but there's many issues, and things that can only be tested remotely. In some cases I've had to guard steps if: ${{ !env.ACT }} so they don't run locally.
igor47 1y ago
I've wanted this so much! My main questions are about permissions. I use environment-specific variables and secrets, I would need to reconfigure them locally and didn't see how. The other issue is workload identity federation.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  could you just source vars from an .env file? maybe a bit more work to get the secrets pulled down. i guess ideally you'd want to be able to pull those values directly from github as an option (including secrets) if that's your primary source of truth.
- jlongman 1y ago
  Secrets can be loaded from a file. https://nektosact.com/usage/index.html?highlight=Secret#secrets https://nektosact.com/usage/index.html?highlight=Secret#secr...
iotapi322 1y ago
Lots of changes have to be made to your github action workflow to actually make this work properly.
- mytydev 1y ago
  What things have you needed to change? Can't say I've ever needed to do that but of course I've only used it on a few projects.
  - jlongman 1y ago
    In GitHub we use an OIDC token to access some AWS resources. Locally I need to populate tokens etc and so I have an `if: ${{ACT}}` and a not condition to populate it.
ryangg 1y ago
Just this week I tried giving this another chance to debug some weird CI failures for ruby tests. I’m on M-series macs so there is an inherent platform mismatch. That coupled with us using depot images as action runners. I was never able to get it running past the dry-run stage. There is just a lot of differences between CI runners and my local docker images. I even gave the image from catthehacker a try. Which is like >15GB. It still wouldn’t run. Finally gave up.
- jlongman 1y ago
  It’s even worse than that, it’s 20GB compressed and 60GB uncompressed. Regardless, if your VM runs out of disk space there’s no meaningful error (well 12 months ago) except a failure to start. (Possibly colima-specific I dunno I uninstalled docker-docker) I do find that some things just work locally and fail in real actions and vice versa. For the most part it’s made it easier to move the bar forward though.
- suryao 1y ago
  Something like this may help by letting you ssh into the running instance so you can debug with the exact context: https://docs.warpbuild.com/tools/action-debugger https://docs.warpbuild.com/tools/action-debugger
- larusso 1y ago
  I had luck with my actions I tried to debug. But I also had the issue that the runtime difference is simply too big to 100% trust it. Too bad because I think the tool is quite good.
- Ameo 1y ago
  Sounds similar to my own experiences trying to debug GH actions locally. I've tried twice now to get it working, pulling down many GBs of images and installing stuff and then getting stuck in some obscure configuration or environment issue. I was even running Linux locally which I figured would be the happiest path. I'm not eager to try again, and unless there's a CI that's very slow or GH actions that need to be updated often for some reason, I feel like it's better to just brute-force it - waiting for CI to run remotely.
tagraves 1y ago
In my experience (and as reflected by the comments on this post already), trying to run complex CI workflow locally is a fairly hopeless enterprise. If you have a fully containerized workflow, you might be able to get close, but even then ensuring you have all of your CI specific environment variables is often not a trivial task, and if your workflow orchestrates things across tasks (e.g. one task uploads an artifact and another task uses that artifact) you'll have a hard time reproducing exactly what is happening in CI. My company (RWX) builds a GitHub Actions competitor and we intentionally do not support local execution -- instead we focused on making it easy to kick off remote builds from your local machine without having to do a `git push` and we made it easy to grab an SSH session before, during, or after a running task to inspect things in the exact build environment that your workflow is running.
- esafak 1y ago
  For local development you can use .env files and mise. https://mise.jdx.dev/environments/#env-file https://mise.jdx.dev/environments/#env-file I use dagger to read these .env/mise env vars and inject dummy values into the test container. Production is taken care of with a secrets manager.
pydry 1y ago
It's amazing that Microsoft built a whole IDE and programming environment for builds but left all the debugging tools up to the community.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  You don't get vendor lock in if you're able to run GHA on any compute you'd like (yes, I'm aware of self-hosted runners, and even that their Packer code is open source. That doesn't make it easy to use GHA outside of github.com)
brianhorakh 1y ago
WARNING: act is great if you use docker. Act does not support podman. Issues or discussions related to providing support/coverage/compatibility/workarounds for podman are closed with a terse message. Unusual for an open source project.
- organsnyder 1y ago
  There's a long-open issue[1] for Podman support. Maybe they're just tired of dups? [1] https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/303 https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/303
  - sundarurfriend 1y ago
    Seems like that was also closed for about half a year, maybe GP came across [this discussion](https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/553#issuecomment-791562237 https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/553#issuecomment-791562...) during that period and (understandably) came to their conclusion from that.
joshstrange 1y ago
Last time I looked at it, Act was a lot like the “serverless offline” options out there that try to mimic AWS services. If your use case is straightforward then I might work but if you do anything “exotic” (often the types of things I’m trying to debug in a failed run) Act doesn’t fully replicate the GHA experience. Also, understandably, there is no macOS support and I use macOS on GHA for iOS builds (another place I have to debug that this wouldn’t cover).
arclight_ 1y ago
It's important to note that this tool does not use the same container images or runtime environment that GitHub Actions actually runs. It's an approximation. For simple use cases that won't matter, but if you have complex GitHub Actions you're bound to find varying behavior. That can lead to frustration when you're debugging bizarre CI failures.
- plumeria 1y ago
  AWS Lambda publishes Docker images (e.g. public.ecr.aws/lambda/python:3.12-arm64), does Github Actions have something similar?
  - esafak 1y ago
    https://github.com/actions/runner-images https://github.com/actions/runner-images
    - mdaniel 1y ago
      In case anyone else is similarly curious, I managed to get the ubuntu images to build .qcow2 images with some lightweight patches to the packer files and the interior .sh provisioning scripts. I have intention of setting up (heh) GHA to build them on the regular but it has not yet risen to be the highest priority weekend project If you may say "but, why?!" it's because I really wanted to know what versions of everything I could expect in GHA, and I detest "git commit -amdummy && git push" stupidity so I guess the answer is "because I'm wired that way"
- globular-toast 1y ago
  Yeah, this is lame. With Gitlab you can choose the exact image that runs and provide your own. So you can easily run the exact same code in the exact same environment locally. I guess it would be nice to have a tool to convert a Gitlab YAML to Docker incantations, but I've never needed to do it that often for it to be a problem.
ElijahLynn 1y ago
GitHub really needs to support local development with GitHub actions. Sheesh. What a step backwards.
- joshdavham 1y ago
  > GitHub really needs to support local development with GitHub actions. Agreed. I’m thankful for tools like act, but there really should be an officially supported way to run gh actions locally.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Feel like the correct way to use any CI these days is to just have it do almost nothing. The CI just triggers a script. And then you can run that script locally.
  - nrvn 1y ago
    exactly. I am surprised by the amount of comments in this and similar threads praying for github to add more complexity to an already over-complicated and fragile solution. CI must be local-first and platform-agnostic.
    - paulryanrogers 1y ago
      Because you may want caching, or to install certain software in the VM or container that you already have locally. Separating scripts could help, but IME the CI environment is always different enough that some branching or mimicking is needed to harmonize them.
      - Gigachad 1y ago
        Caching is fine, you likely don’t have to replicate that locally as in theory it should do nothing. For installing software, create a docker image that already has everything you need.
- sureIy 1y ago
badmonster 1y ago
wow this is a popular project^_^ Which GitHub Actions context variables are emulated or customizable in act, like github.event, github.actor, or secrets
paulryanrogers 1y ago
This didn't work for me. I found just running Ubuntu in VirtualBox was close enough for my use case.
franky47 1y ago
I would love for this to actually work, but apart from trivial workflows, it never replaced the dreaded game of CI ping/pong. My alternative was to have a dedicated repository where I can spam the Git and workflow run histories as much as I need to experiment with workflows.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
droelf 1y ago
I think this is really cool. We're tackling this problem from the other side by building `pixi` (pixi.sh) which bundles project / package management with a task runner so that any CI should be as simple as `pixi run test` and easy to execute locally or in the cloud.
- claytonjy 1y ago
  that’s not really what’s new or special about pixi, is it? poetry (poethepoet) and uv can both do variations of this. From the outside, pixi looks like a way to replace (conda + pip) with (not-conda + uv). It’s like uv-for-conda, but also uses uv internally. Better task running is cool, but it would be odd to use pixi if you don’t otherwise need conda stuff. And extra super duper weird if you don’t have any python code!
- pxc 1y ago
  My team has a setup that sounds essentially the same using Nix via devenv.sh. We deterministically bundle and run everything from OpenTofu and all its providers to our programming languages runtimes to our pre-commit hooks this way, and it also features a task runner that builds a dependency graph and runs things in parallel and so on. Our commands for CI are all just one liners that go to wrappers than pin all our dependencies. Lately I've been working with a lot of cross-platform Bash scripts that run natively on macOS, WSL, and Linux servers, with little to no consideration for the differences. It's been good!
  - ayrtondesozzla 1y ago
    I'd be interested to know more about a team that uses Nix and Guix. Is there a website or email an interested party can contact?
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
We have come full circle
samgranieri 1y ago
I’ve been bedeviled by arm/intel/Mac issues with this. I want to be able to use this project, I really do. But it’s just not yet there, and this isn’t on Nektos. Nektos is, as best I understand it, trying to approximate GHA, but it’s not easy.
- jt_b 1y ago
  I've seen (but not used) this tool recently, which seems like it does a similar thing. Curious if it is any better experience. https://github.com/bahdotsh/wrkflw https://github.com/bahdotsh/wrkflw
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    As someone with a deep interest in this space, I spent a non-trivial amount of time tire-kicking that. One can view the issues for my experiences, including the one where I wished the dev all the best but stopped playing QA for the project. It's goal is primarily a TUI for GHA, not an emulation for GHA
esafak 1y ago
I try to do as much as possible in a (dagger) script and use the GHA to call it. That way I can test the script locally. I wonder if there is a proposal to support code-based actions. Config-based CI needs to die.
- spion 1y ago
  Why dagger and not just... any language? (Nushell for example https://www.nushell.sh/ https://www.nushell.sh/)
  - esafak 1y ago
    Because I'm typically building and running tests in containers in CI, which is what dagger is for. nu is my default shell. Note that I am not talking about dagger shell. https://dagger.io/blog/a-shell-for-the-container-age-introducing-dagger-shell https://dagger.io/blog/a-shell-for-the-container-age-introdu...
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  Yup. Every time there's one of these threads I renew my call for GHA to have hooks where in-band build tools like nix, bazel, dagger, and friends can propagate upward optimal information to be displayed in the web gui, in particular annotations and info about multiple tasks that run in parallel or series.
joshdavham 1y ago
What are some recommended alternatives for act, if any? I’ve been a long time user, but I’ve run into tons of problems with act over the last year and am wondering if there are better alternatives out there.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
claytonjy 1y ago
anyone have any tips for testing actions locally, rather than workflows? Despite the name, act is really only for the latter. You can try to test a local action by putting it in a workflow and calling that, but if you do a checkout in your workflow that will overwrite the mount of your local code into the act container, meaning you’ll get the version from the remote branch instead. Depending on the action, you may not be able to comment out the checkout step while testing.
- cedws 1y ago
  I needed to do this recently, the only way I could find was with a proxy workflow.
Daviey 1y ago
`act`is great, but it's still annoying dealing with secrets!
cyberax 1y ago
I'm convinced that the only way is to do the reverse. Make the Github actions just be a thin wrapper over docker-compose invocations.
notnmeyer 1y ago
like a lot of folks i found nektos lacking. instead, i focused on keeping the gha workflows really light and putting any complexity in Task (taskfile.dev)—that way the meat of the workflows can be run locally, and the gha syntax is just the glue. it works out very well.
Kinrany 1y ago
Every mention of Github Actions is an occasion to start looking for the best alternative in <current_month>, let's go! Is Dagger usable yet? Is there still hope for Earthly? Are general purpose workflow systems winning any time soon, or are we still afraid of writing code? Any new systems out there that cover all the totally basic features like running locally, unlike Github Actions?
- manx 1y ago
  I think we could build something on top of nix that is as easy to use and powerful as earthly, but gets all the nice stuff from nix: reproducibility, caching, just use any command from any nix package, etc
  - asdffdasy 1y ago
    that's actually the only good use for nix.
  - pxc 1y ago
    I built something like this out using an old version of Dagger and found it enormously complicated, and the they rewrote everything and abandoned the version of Dagger I used. When I they did, I said "fuck it" and just started distributing a Nix flake with wrappers for all the tools I want to run in CI so that at least that part gets handled safely and is easy to run locally. The worst and most annoying stuff to test is the CI platforms' accursed little pseudo-YAML DSLs. I still would like that piece. devenv.sh tasks might be a good basis for building on it. I think maybe bob.build also wants to be like this
    - sea-gold 1y ago
      In addition to https://devenv.sh https://devenv.sh and https://bob.build https://bob.build , here are 2 others that are based on Nix. - https://flox.dev https://flox.dev - https://www.jetify.com/devbox https://www.jetify.com/devbox
      - 1y ago
eYrKEC2 1y ago
Anyone use kubernetes argo workflow for CI automation?
nomilk 1y ago
Dumb question, but why hasn’t GitHub made a solution that lets you run GitHub Actions locally? Or at the very least a solution that validates the action (giving a bit more certainty that it will succeed, a bit like a dry-run)? (My war story:) I stopped using GHAs after an optimistic attempt to save myself five key strokes ‘r’ ‘s’ ‘p’ ‘e’ ‘c’ led to 40+ commits and seeing the sunrise but still no successful test run via GHA. Headless browsers can be fragile but the cost benefit ratio against using GHA was horrible, at least for an indy dev.
- immibis 1y ago
  Why would GitHub (a Microsoft service) want you to be less dependent on GitHub? That just makes the extinguishing part harder.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- timewizard 1y ago
  They do. Your action can be empty and actions generate webhook events. Do whatever you want with the webhook.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
    It’s the allure of the marketplace that gets people. They’re like “oh I could parse my test report files and upload all of them somewhere and render them with a nice output on my pr! I could spend a week writing and testing all of this or I can slap this action here into the YAML and be done with it in 10 minutes. The trap and tradeoff is that the thirtieth time you’ve done that is when you realize you’ve screwed yourself and the organization by building this Byzantine half baked DAG with a very sketchy security story that you can’t step through, run locally or test
- digianarchist 1y ago
  Like https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/ https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/ ?
immibis 1y ago
Back in the day we called that a shell script. We had this tool called Jenkins that would run the shell script in a new folder every time you pushed a change to gitlab. It was pretty neat.
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Rather than tying CI & deployments to Github Actions, it is usually better to pull as much of it as possible out to shell scripts and call them in containers in GH actions.. There are optimizations you’ll want (caching downloaded dependencies etc); if you wait to make those after your build is CI-agnostic you’ll be less tempted by vendor specific shortcuts. Usually means more code - but, easier to test locally. Also, swapping providers later will be difficult but not “spin up a team and spend 6 months” level.
- Cloudef 1y ago
  Nix is in fact perfect for this.
  - lenova 1y ago
    As a non-Nix user, could you give me an example?
    - Cloudef 1y ago
      While flakes have their own "checks" thing, what I do is just have a app definition in flake with the required dependencies. https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/flake.nix#L25-L56 https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/flake.nix#L25... https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-budoux/blob/master/flake.nix#L30-L42 https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-budoux/blob/master/flake.nix#... The actual GA workflow file is pretty simple: https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/.github/workflows/pr.yml#L19-L30 https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/.github/workf...
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  This is always the top comment in these kinds of threads, and I see this as an indication that the current state of CI/CD is pathetically propriety. It’s like the dark times before free and open source compilers. When are we going to push back and say enough is enough!? CI/CD desperately needs something akin to Kubernetes to claw back our control and ability to work locally. Personally, I’m fed up with pipeline development inner loops that involve a Git commit, push, and waiting around for five minutes with no debugger, no variable inspector, and dumping things to console logs like I’m writing C in the 1980s. You and I shouldn’t be reinventing these wheels while standing inside the tyre shop.
exiguus 1y ago
If CI/CD tools were code editors, then Jenkins/JFrog would be like Vi/Vim—powerful and traditional. GitLab CI would resemble Helix or Zed, offering a modern and efficient approach. Meanwhile, GitHub Actions would be akin to VSCode, but with a touch of Dreamweaver CC, blending user-friendly features with comprehensive capabilities.
- marenkay 1y ago
  Have you ever use any of those in a realistic scenario? Any existing CI/CD solution is broken like hell and if you try to do more advanced stuff like reusing templates or actions, all hell breaks lose. Don't get me started on clones via SSH, doing commits from pipelines, etc. CI/CD is one of the topics that is barely solved or usable ...
  - exiguus 1y ago
    Actually, I have considerable experience setting up and running various CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Travis CI. In my experience, GitHub Actions work quite well, especially for smaller projects or when you can avoid using public templates and actions. While shortcuts like third-party libraries or actions can be convenient, they often come with trade-offs. For scenarios where having your own runners and build images is beneficial, I would recommend GitLab CI. Jenkins is a great choice if you need to run builds on dedicated hardware or within a virtualized environment. When discussing the challenges of CI/CD, I often notice that many issues stem from complex chains of dependencies within the software or product itself. For example, consider a release pipeline that typically takes six hours to complete but fails after four hours. In such cases, having to restart the entire pipeline instead of just the failed job can be quite inefficient. Additionally, debugging can become much easier when you have your own build images on runners, as you can run them locally for testing and troubleshooting. What specific aspects of CI/CD do you find broken or challenging?
OptionOfT 1y ago
I've had the displeasure of working with Macs on which we wrote code that would end up being a docker container. But what is compiled on a Mac is an aarch64 container. What is compiled on an AMD64 Linux machine is amd64. This is annoying when the code you write is native or reaches out to native stuff. Then all of the sudden your container that builds perfectly on the Mac doesn't build on Linux anymore. (and vice versa, looking at you gcc on debian). GitHub just (January) got Linux ARM runners, but they're not available for private customers yet. And their Mac runners do not come with Docker, and it cannot be installed.
- realitysballs 1y ago
  Match dev env to prod env?
  - OptionOfT 1y ago
    No, as their MDM solution only works on Macs.
    - mdaniel 1y ago
      In fairness, the opposite way usually ends up being much cheaper: make prod run arm64 I would guess that just `alias docker="docker --platform=linux/amd64"` type thing would go a long way toward evicting those platform mismatches[1]. I would also guess there's a way to switch off the binfmt "helper" in colima such that trying to run arm64 in the VM would immediately puke rather than silently helping you 1: or, of course, don't push production containers from your workstation, but the years have taught me that I'm talking to myself
      - OptionOfT 1y ago
        All of this is an effort to validate that building works on all environments. > alias docker="docker --platform=linux/amd64" I think that on its own breaks a Rust project which uses openssl with the vendored feature.
- 1y ago
deivid 1y ago
I'm using this to run on a risc-v board I have at home, it's pretty nice. My action just calls `make build test` but it is convenient to have it hooked to GH for automated testing on PRs
CafeRacer 1y ago
act is a great helper tool for another tool that is an utter shit. Ive given up on gh actions a while ago and transitioned to bash scripts in docker containers. I can reproduce stuff locally, can test it, can debug it, etc. I dont get how GH Actions do not yet have a tool that looks and works like jupyter workbook. Then it would have been fantastic.
sudb 1y ago
I use this for work - but there are edge cases all over the place that I keep running into (e.g. Yarn being installed on Github-hosted runners, but not self-hosted ones or act - https://github.com/actions/setup-node/issues/182 https://github.com/actions/setup-node/issues/182) Apart from that it's been quite good!
- Aurornis 1y ago
  Same experience here. Edge cases everywhere, though most can be worked around. You can specify different runners to use. The default images are a compromise to keep size down. There is a very large image that tries to include everything you might want. I would suggest trying that if you don’t mind the very large (15GB IIRC) image.
  - sudb 1y ago
    I definitely remember considering the larger images - I think we ended up not using them since my work's usecase for act is running user github workflows on-demand on temporary VMs. The hope was that most usage is covered by the smaller images - and in fairness that has been true so far.

273 points by flashblaze 1y ago

I've been using this recently but there's many issues, and things that can only be tested remotely. In some cases I've had to guard steps if: ${{ !env.ACT }} so they don't run locally.

igor47 1y ago

I've wanted this so much! My main questions are about permissions. I use environment-specific variables and secrets, I would need to reconfigure them locally and didn't see how. The other issue is workload identity federation.

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
could you just source vars from an .env file? maybe a bit more work to get the secrets pulled down. i guess ideally you'd want to be able to pull those values directly from github as an option (including secrets) if that's your primary source of truth.
jlongman 1y ago
Secrets can be loaded from a file. https://nektosact.com/usage/index.html?highlight=Secret#secrets https://nektosact.com/usage/index.html?highlight=Secret#secr...

iotapi322 1y ago

Lots of changes have to be made to your github action workflow to actually make this work properly.

mytydev 1y ago
What things have you needed to change? Can't say I've ever needed to do that but of course I've only used it on a few projects.
- jlongman 1y ago
  In GitHub we use an OIDC token to access some AWS resources. Locally I need to populate tokens etc and so I have an `if: ${{ACT}}` and a not condition to populate it.

ryangg 1y ago

Just this week I tried giving this another chance to debug some weird CI failures for ruby tests. I’m on M-series macs so there is an inherent platform mismatch. That coupled with us using depot images as action runners. I was never able to get it running past the dry-run stage. There is just a lot of differences between CI runners and my local docker images. I even gave the image from catthehacker a try. Which is like >15GB. It still wouldn’t run. Finally gave up.

jlongman 1y ago
It’s even worse than that, it’s 20GB compressed and 60GB uncompressed. Regardless, if your VM runs out of disk space there’s no meaningful error (well 12 months ago) except a failure to start. (Possibly colima-specific I dunno I uninstalled docker-docker) I do find that some things just work locally and fail in real actions and vice versa. For the most part it’s made it easier to move the bar forward though.
suryao 1y ago
Something like this may help by letting you ssh into the running instance so you can debug with the exact context: https://docs.warpbuild.com/tools/action-debugger https://docs.warpbuild.com/tools/action-debugger
larusso 1y ago
I had luck with my actions I tried to debug. But I also had the issue that the runtime difference is simply too big to 100% trust it. Too bad because I think the tool is quite good.
Ameo 1y ago
Sounds similar to my own experiences trying to debug GH actions locally. I've tried twice now to get it working, pulling down many GBs of images and installing stuff and then getting stuck in some obscure configuration or environment issue. I was even running Linux locally which I figured would be the happiest path. I'm not eager to try again, and unless there's a CI that's very slow or GH actions that need to be updated often for some reason, I feel like it's better to just brute-force it - waiting for CI to run remotely.

tagraves 1y ago

In my experience (and as reflected by the comments on this post already), trying to run complex CI workflow locally is a fairly hopeless enterprise. If you have a fully containerized workflow, you might be able to get close, but even then ensuring you have all of your CI specific environment variables is often not a trivial task, and if your workflow orchestrates things across tasks (e.g. one task uploads an artifact and another task uses that artifact) you'll have a hard time reproducing exactly what is happening in CI. My company (RWX) builds a GitHub Actions competitor and we intentionally do not support local execution -- instead we focused on making it easy to kick off remote builds from your local machine without having to do a `git push` and we made it easy to grab an SSH session before, during, or after a running task to inspect things in the exact build environment that your workflow is running.

esafak 1y ago
For local development you can use .env files and mise. https://mise.jdx.dev/environments/#env-file https://mise.jdx.dev/environments/#env-file I use dagger to read these .env/mise env vars and inject dummy values into the test container. Production is taken care of with a secrets manager.

pydry 1y ago

It's amazing that Microsoft built a whole IDE and programming environment for builds but left all the debugging tools up to the community.

mdaniel 1y ago
You don't get vendor lock in if you're able to run GHA on any compute you'd like (yes, I'm aware of self-hosted runners, and even that their Packer code is open source. That doesn't make it easy to use GHA outside of github.com)

brianhorakh 1y ago

WARNING: act is great if you use docker. Act does not support podman. Issues or discussions related to providing support/coverage/compatibility/workarounds for podman are closed with a terse message. Unusual for an open source project.

organsnyder 1y ago
There's a long-open issue[1] for Podman support. Maybe they're just tired of dups? [1] https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/303 https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/303
- sundarurfriend 1y ago
  Seems like that was also closed for about half a year, maybe GP came across [this discussion](https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/553#issuecomment-791562237 https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/553#issuecomment-791562...) during that period and (understandably) came to their conclusion from that.

joshstrange 1y ago

Last time I looked at it, Act was a lot like the “serverless offline” options out there that try to mimic AWS services. If your use case is straightforward then I might work but if you do anything “exotic” (often the types of things I’m trying to debug in a failed run) Act doesn’t fully replicate the GHA experience. Also, understandably, there is no macOS support and I use macOS on GHA for iOS builds (another place I have to debug that this wouldn’t cover).

arclight_ 1y ago

It's important to note that this tool does not use the same container images or runtime environment that GitHub Actions actually runs. It's an approximation. For simple use cases that won't matter, but if you have complex GitHub Actions you're bound to find varying behavior. That can lead to frustration when you're debugging bizarre CI failures.

plumeria 1y ago
AWS Lambda publishes Docker images (e.g. public.ecr.aws/lambda/python:3.12-arm64), does Github Actions have something similar?
- esafak 1y ago
  https://github.com/actions/runner-images https://github.com/actions/runner-images
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    In case anyone else is similarly curious, I managed to get the ubuntu images to build .qcow2 images with some lightweight patches to the packer files and the interior .sh provisioning scripts. I have intention of setting up (heh) GHA to build them on the regular but it has not yet risen to be the highest priority weekend project If you may say "but, why?!" it's because I really wanted to know what versions of everything I could expect in GHA, and I detest "git commit -amdummy && git push" stupidity so I guess the answer is "because I'm wired that way"
globular-toast 1y ago
Yeah, this is lame. With Gitlab you can choose the exact image that runs and provide your own. So you can easily run the exact same code in the exact same environment locally. I guess it would be nice to have a tool to convert a Gitlab YAML to Docker incantations, but I've never needed to do it that often for it to be a problem.

ElijahLynn 1y ago

GitHub really needs to support local development with GitHub actions. Sheesh. What a step backwards.

joshdavham 1y ago
> GitHub really needs to support local development with GitHub actions. Agreed. I’m thankful for tools like act, but there really should be an officially supported way to run gh actions locally.
Gigachad 1y ago
Feel like the correct way to use any CI these days is to just have it do almost nothing. The CI just triggers a script. And then you can run that script locally.
- nrvn 1y ago
  exactly. I am surprised by the amount of comments in this and similar threads praying for github to add more complexity to an already over-complicated and fragile solution. CI must be local-first and platform-agnostic.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    Because you may want caching, or to install certain software in the VM or container that you already have locally. Separating scripts could help, but IME the CI environment is always different enough that some branching or mimicking is needed to harmonize them.
    - Gigachad 1y ago
      Caching is fine, you likely don’t have to replicate that locally as in theory it should do nothing. For installing software, create a docker image that already has everything you need.
sureIy 1y ago

badmonster 1y ago

wow this is a popular project^_^ Which GitHub Actions context variables are emulated or customizable in act, like github.event, github.actor, or secrets

paulryanrogers 1y ago

This didn't work for me. I found just running Ubuntu in VirtualBox was close enough for my use case.

franky47 1y ago

I would love for this to actually work, but apart from trivial workflows, it never replaced the dreaded game of CI ping/pong. My alternative was to have a dedicated repository where I can spam the Git and workflow run histories as much as I need to experiment with workflows.

deleted 1y ago
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droelf 1y ago

I think this is really cool. We're tackling this problem from the other side by building `pixi` (pixi.sh) which bundles project / package management with a task runner so that any CI should be as simple as `pixi run test` and easy to execute locally or in the cloud.

claytonjy 1y ago
that’s not really what’s new or special about pixi, is it? poetry (poethepoet) and uv can both do variations of this. From the outside, pixi looks like a way to replace (conda + pip) with (not-conda + uv). It’s like uv-for-conda, but also uses uv internally. Better task running is cool, but it would be odd to use pixi if you don’t otherwise need conda stuff. And extra super duper weird if you don’t have any python code!
pxc 1y ago
My team has a setup that sounds essentially the same using Nix via devenv.sh. We deterministically bundle and run everything from OpenTofu and all its providers to our programming languages runtimes to our pre-commit hooks this way, and it also features a task runner that builds a dependency graph and runs things in parallel and so on. Our commands for CI are all just one liners that go to wrappers than pin all our dependencies. Lately I've been working with a lot of cross-platform Bash scripts that run natively on macOS, WSL, and Linux servers, with little to no consideration for the differences. It's been good!
- ayrtondesozzla 1y ago
  I'd be interested to know more about a team that uses Nix and Guix. Is there a website or email an interested party can contact?

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

We have come full circle

samgranieri 1y ago

I’ve been bedeviled by arm/intel/Mac issues with this. I want to be able to use this project, I really do. But it’s just not yet there, and this isn’t on Nektos. Nektos is, as best I understand it, trying to approximate GHA, but it’s not easy.

jt_b 1y ago
I've seen (but not used) this tool recently, which seems like it does a similar thing. Curious if it is any better experience. https://github.com/bahdotsh/wrkflw https://github.com/bahdotsh/wrkflw
- mdaniel 1y ago
  As someone with a deep interest in this space, I spent a non-trivial amount of time tire-kicking that. One can view the issues for my experiences, including the one where I wished the dev all the best but stopped playing QA for the project. It's goal is primarily a TUI for GHA, not an emulation for GHA

esafak 1y ago

I try to do as much as possible in a (dagger) script and use the GHA to call it. That way I can test the script locally. I wonder if there is a proposal to support code-based actions. Config-based CI needs to die.

spion 1y ago
Why dagger and not just... any language? (Nushell for example https://www.nushell.sh/ https://www.nushell.sh/)
- esafak 1y ago
  Because I'm typically building and running tests in containers in CI, which is what dagger is for. nu is my default shell. Note that I am not talking about dagger shell. https://dagger.io/blog/a-shell-for-the-container-age-introducing-dagger-shell https://dagger.io/blog/a-shell-for-the-container-age-introdu...
mikepurvis 1y ago
Yup. Every time there's one of these threads I renew my call for GHA to have hooks where in-band build tools like nix, bazel, dagger, and friends can propagate upward optimal information to be displayed in the web gui, in particular annotations and info about multiple tasks that run in parallel or series.

joshdavham 1y ago

What are some recommended alternatives for act, if any? I’ve been a long time user, but I’ve run into tons of problems with act over the last year and am wondering if there are better alternatives out there.

deleted 1y ago

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claytonjy 1y ago

anyone have any tips for testing actions locally, rather than workflows? Despite the name, act is really only for the latter. You can try to test a local action by putting it in a workflow and calling that, but if you do a checkout in your workflow that will overwrite the mount of your local code into the act container, meaning you’ll get the version from the remote branch instead. Depending on the action, you may not be able to comment out the checkout step while testing.

cedws 1y ago
I needed to do this recently, the only way I could find was with a proxy workflow.

Daviey 1y ago

`act`is great, but it's still annoying dealing with secrets!

cyberax 1y ago

I'm convinced that the only way is to do the reverse. Make the Github actions just be a thin wrapper over docker-compose invocations.

notnmeyer 1y ago

like a lot of folks i found nektos lacking. instead, i focused on keeping the gha workflows really light and putting any complexity in Task (taskfile.dev)—that way the meat of the workflows can be run locally, and the gha syntax is just the glue. it works out very well.

Kinrany 1y ago

Every mention of Github Actions is an occasion to start looking for the best alternative in <current_month>, let's go! Is Dagger usable yet? Is there still hope for Earthly? Are general purpose workflow systems winning any time soon, or are we still afraid of writing code? Any new systems out there that cover all the totally basic features like running locally, unlike Github Actions?

manx 1y ago
I think we could build something on top of nix that is as easy to use and powerful as earthly, but gets all the nice stuff from nix: reproducibility, caching, just use any command from any nix package, etc
- asdffdasy 1y ago
  that's actually the only good use for nix.
- pxc 1y ago
  I built something like this out using an old version of Dagger and found it enormously complicated, and the they rewrote everything and abandoned the version of Dagger I used. When I they did, I said "fuck it" and just started distributing a Nix flake with wrappers for all the tools I want to run in CI so that at least that part gets handled safely and is easy to run locally. The worst and most annoying stuff to test is the CI platforms' accursed little pseudo-YAML DSLs. I still would like that piece. devenv.sh tasks might be a good basis for building on it. I think maybe bob.build also wants to be like this
  - sea-gold 1y ago
    In addition to https://devenv.sh https://devenv.sh and https://bob.build https://bob.build , here are 2 others that are based on Nix. - https://flox.dev https://flox.dev - https://www.jetify.com/devbox https://www.jetify.com/devbox
    - 1y ago

eYrKEC2 1y ago

Anyone use kubernetes argo workflow for CI automation?

nomilk 1y ago

Dumb question, but why hasn’t GitHub made a solution that lets you run GitHub Actions locally? Or at the very least a solution that validates the action (giving a bit more certainty that it will succeed, a bit like a dry-run)? (My war story:) I stopped using GHAs after an optimistic attempt to save myself five key strokes ‘r’ ‘s’ ‘p’ ‘e’ ‘c’ led to 40+ commits and seeing the sunrise but still no successful test run via GHA. Headless browsers can be fragile but the cost benefit ratio against using GHA was horrible, at least for an indy dev.

immibis 1y ago
Why would GitHub (a Microsoft service) want you to be less dependent on GitHub? That just makes the extinguishing part harder.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
timewizard 1y ago
They do. Your action can be empty and actions generate webhook events. Do whatever you want with the webhook.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  It’s the allure of the marketplace that gets people. They’re like “oh I could parse my test report files and upload all of them somewhere and render them with a nice output on my pr! I could spend a week writing and testing all of this or I can slap this action here into the YAML and be done with it in 10 minutes. The trap and tradeoff is that the thirtieth time you’ve done that is when you realize you’ve screwed yourself and the organization by building this Byzantine half baked DAG with a very sketchy security story that you can’t step through, run locally or test
digianarchist 1y ago
Like https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/ https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/ ?

immibis 1y ago

Back in the day we called that a shell script. We had this tool called Jenkins that would run the shell script in a new folder every time you pushed a change to gitlab. It was pretty neat.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Rather than tying CI & deployments to Github Actions, it is usually better to pull as much of it as possible out to shell scripts and call them in containers in GH actions.. There are optimizations you’ll want (caching downloaded dependencies etc); if you wait to make those after your build is CI-agnostic you’ll be less tempted by vendor specific shortcuts. Usually means more code - but, easier to test locally. Also, swapping providers later will be difficult but not “spin up a team and spend 6 months” level.

Cloudef 1y ago
Nix is in fact perfect for this.
- lenova 1y ago
  As a non-Nix user, could you give me an example?
  - Cloudef 1y ago
    While flakes have their own "checks" thing, what I do is just have a app definition in flake with the required dependencies. https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/flake.nix#L25-L56 https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/flake.nix#L25... https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-budoux/blob/master/flake.nix#L30-L42 https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-budoux/blob/master/flake.nix#... The actual GA workflow file is pretty simple: https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/.github/workflows/pr.yml#L19-L30 https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-aio/blob/master/.github/workf...
jiggawatts 1y ago
This is always the top comment in these kinds of threads, and I see this as an indication that the current state of CI/CD is pathetically propriety. It’s like the dark times before free and open source compilers. When are we going to push back and say enough is enough!? CI/CD desperately needs something akin to Kubernetes to claw back our control and ability to work locally. Personally, I’m fed up with pipeline development inner loops that involve a Git commit, push, and waiting around for five minutes with no debugger, no variable inspector, and dumping things to console logs like I’m writing C in the 1980s. You and I shouldn’t be reinventing these wheels while standing inside the tyre shop.

exiguus 1y ago

If CI/CD tools were code editors, then Jenkins/JFrog would be like Vi/Vim—powerful and traditional. GitLab CI would resemble Helix or Zed, offering a modern and efficient approach. Meanwhile, GitHub Actions would be akin to VSCode, but with a touch of Dreamweaver CC, blending user-friendly features with comprehensive capabilities.

marenkay 1y ago
Have you ever use any of those in a realistic scenario? Any existing CI/CD solution is broken like hell and if you try to do more advanced stuff like reusing templates or actions, all hell breaks lose. Don't get me started on clones via SSH, doing commits from pipelines, etc. CI/CD is one of the topics that is barely solved or usable ...
- exiguus 1y ago
  Actually, I have considerable experience setting up and running various CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Travis CI. In my experience, GitHub Actions work quite well, especially for smaller projects or when you can avoid using public templates and actions. While shortcuts like third-party libraries or actions can be convenient, they often come with trade-offs. For scenarios where having your own runners and build images is beneficial, I would recommend GitLab CI. Jenkins is a great choice if you need to run builds on dedicated hardware or within a virtualized environment. When discussing the challenges of CI/CD, I often notice that many issues stem from complex chains of dependencies within the software or product itself. For example, consider a release pipeline that typically takes six hours to complete but fails after four hours. In such cases, having to restart the entire pipeline instead of just the failed job can be quite inefficient. Additionally, debugging can become much easier when you have your own build images on runners, as you can run them locally for testing and troubleshooting. What specific aspects of CI/CD do you find broken or challenging?

OptionOfT 1y ago

I've had the displeasure of working with Macs on which we wrote code that would end up being a docker container. But what is compiled on a Mac is an aarch64 container. What is compiled on an AMD64 Linux machine is amd64. This is annoying when the code you write is native or reaches out to native stuff. Then all of the sudden your container that builds perfectly on the Mac doesn't build on Linux anymore. (and vice versa, looking at you gcc on debian). GitHub just (January) got Linux ARM runners, but they're not available for private customers yet. And their Mac runners do not come with Docker, and it cannot be installed.

realitysballs 1y ago
Match dev env to prod env?
- OptionOfT 1y ago
  No, as their MDM solution only works on Macs.
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    In fairness, the opposite way usually ends up being much cheaper: make prod run arm64 I would guess that just `alias docker="docker --platform=linux/amd64"` type thing would go a long way toward evicting those platform mismatches[1]. I would also guess there's a way to switch off the binfmt "helper" in colima such that trying to run arm64 in the VM would immediately puke rather than silently helping you 1: or, of course, don't push production containers from your workstation, but the years have taught me that I'm talking to myself
    - OptionOfT 1y ago
      All of this is an effort to validate that building works on all environments. > alias docker="docker --platform=linux/amd64" I think that on its own breaks a Rust project which uses openssl with the vendored feature.
1y ago

deivid 1y ago

I'm using this to run on a risc-v board I have at home, it's pretty nice. My action just calls `make build test` but it is convenient to have it hooked to GH for automated testing on PRs

CafeRacer 1y ago

act is a great helper tool for another tool that is an utter shit. Ive given up on gh actions a while ago and transitioned to bash scripts in docker containers. I can reproduce stuff locally, can test it, can debug it, etc. I dont get how GH Actions do not yet have a tool that looks and works like jupyter workbook. Then it would have been fantastic.

sudb 1y ago

I use this for work - but there are edge cases all over the place that I keep running into (e.g. Yarn being installed on Github-hosted runners, but not self-hosted ones or act - https://github.com/actions/setup-node/issues/182 https://github.com/actions/setup-node/issues/182) Apart from that it's been quite good!

Aurornis 1y ago
Same experience here. Edge cases everywhere, though most can be worked around. You can specify different runners to use. The default images are a compromise to keep size down. There is a very large image that tries to include everything you might want. I would suggest trying that if you don’t mind the very large (15GB IIRC) image.
- sudb 1y ago
  I definitely remember considering the larger images - I think we ended up not using them since my work's usecase for act is running user github workflows on-demand on temporary VMs. The hope was that most usage is covered by the smaller images - and in fairness that has been true so far.