Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally • Hacker News Board

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#71

Post by FooBarWidget » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

Arnavion wrote: post #33

Rather than replacing your Makefile with GH Actions, replace your GH Actions with a Makefile, and make your GH Actions run `make` in a script task. Do you really need that GH Action for pulling Docker images / installing $language_compiler / creating cloud resources ? A `docker` / `curl` / `sudo apt-get install` invocation in a Makefile / script needs to be written once and is the same in CI as on your dev machines.…

A Makefile really sucks at displaying outputs/logs of commands, especially when there are lots of commands and when they run concurrently. It also really sucks at communicating what the overall progress is: how many jobs have finished, how many left, how much time has elapsed.

Heck make can make all this much better by just prepending each output line with some colored prefix and timestamp. But make hasn't changed in 30 years and likely won't change.

People are proud that it "solves" things since 1976. Yes if your requirements never changed since 1976. I'm not holding by breath that it will deliver basic usability-enhancing features that one can reasonably expect nowadays.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#72

Post by kodisha » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:04 PM UTC

Arnavion wrote: post #33

Rather than replacing your Makefile with GH Actions, replace your GH Actions with a Makefile, and make your GH Actions run `make` in a script task. Do you really need that GH Action for pulling Docker images / installing $language_compiler / creating cloud resources ? A `docker` / `curl` / `sudo apt-get install` invocation in a Makefile / script needs to be written once and is the same in CI as on your dev machines.…

Can anyone point me out to a GH repo with this or similar setup. Eager to learn, especially if it runs a bit more complex node/next.js build.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#73

Post by FooBarWidget » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

Arnavion wrote: post #38

Gigachad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With actions you can run multiple tasks in parallel, restart failed portions without retrying the whole CI, run certain sections with conditions like which branch you are on (different tasks when commit to master vs feature branch)

>With actions you can run multiple tasks in parallel, If you mean "I want to run one build with the foo feature and one build with the bar feature. Actions lets me run those in parallel", then that is the "strategy" part of the workflow, not the "tasks" part. My comment was about the latter. ("and make your GH Actions run `make` in a script task.") If you mean "I want to run two steps of a job in parallel and then ru…

> Running things in parallel is literally a single `&` character.

Yes now try waiting for all parallel tasks, and error out if at least one errors. And try separating their output so that they don't get interleaved into a big mess. And try by default hiding the outputs of commands that succeeded, only showing those that failed, except when the user explicitly asks for it.

Your "simple" shell script now suddenly isn't so simple anymore.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#74

Post by nerdyadventurer » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

Arnavion wrote: post #33

Rather than replacing your Makefile with GH Actions, replace your GH Actions with a Makefile, and make your GH Actions run `make` in a script task. Do you really need that GH Action for pulling Docker images / installing $language_compiler / creating cloud resources ? A `docker` / `curl` / `sudo apt-get install` invocation in a Makefile / script needs to be written once and is the same in CI as on your dev machines.…

Any examples, blog posts on how to use Makefiles for CI?

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#75

Post by nerdyadventurer » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

kodisha wrote: post #72

Arnavion wrote: post #33

Rather than replacing your Makefile with GH Actions, replace your GH Actions with a Makefile, and make your GH Actions run `make` in a script task. Do you really need that GH Action for pulling Docker images / installing $language_compiler / creating cloud resources ? A `docker` / `curl` / `sudo apt-get install` invocation in a Makefile / script needs to be written once and is the same in CI as on your dev machines.…

Can anyone point me out to a GH repo with this or similar setup. Eager to learn, especially if it runs a bit more complex node/next.js build.

me too, examples please!

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#76

Post by doliveira » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #71

Arnavion wrote: post #33

Rather than replacing your Makefile with GH Actions, replace your GH Actions with a Makefile, and make your GH Actions run `make` in a script task. Do you really need that GH Action for pulling Docker images / installing $language_compiler / creating cloud resources ? A `docker` / `curl` / `sudo apt-get install` invocation in a Makefile / script needs to be written once and is the same in CI as on your dev machines.…

A Makefile really sucks at displaying outputs/logs of commands, especially when there are lots of commands and when they run concurrently. It also really sucks at communicating what the overall progress is: how many jobs have finished, how many left, how much time has elapsed. Heck make can make all this much better by just prepending each output line with some colored prefix and timestamp. But make hasn't changed in…

You can just invoke make build, make test within the specific CI stages.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#77

Post by toastal » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

imaltont wrote: post #34

Git also has built in support for automated stuff (git hooks). By default it is only local to each machine, but it is possible to set it up to distribute the hooks too.

Yep. And these hook shell scripts, don't need to involve Node.js projects (cough Husky) injecting this scripts and executing them without your consent.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#78

Post by FooBarWidget » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

doliveira wrote: post #76

FooBarWidget wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Makefile really sucks at displaying outputs/logs of commands, especially when there are lots of commands and when they run concurrently. It also really sucks at communicating what the overall progress is: how many jobs have finished, how many left, how much time has elapsed. Heck make can make all this much better by just prepending each output line with some colored prefix and timestamp. But make hasn't changed in…

You can just invoke make build, make test within the specific CI stages.

Then you reduce make to a simple small-scale task runner, basically admitting that it's unusable for large numbers of heterogeneous tasks or concurrency.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#79

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

Arnavion wrote: post #33

Rather than replacing your Makefile with GH Actions, replace your GH Actions with a Makefile, and make your GH Actions run `make` in a script task. Do you really need that GH Action for pulling Docker images / installing $language_compiler / creating cloud resources ? A `docker` / `curl` / `sudo apt-get install` invocation in a Makefile / script needs to be written once and is the same in CI as on your dev machines.…

[deleted]

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#80

Post by hk1337 » Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

jerpint wrote: post #8

camkego wrote: post #5

The lack of a frictionless way to run github actions locally has always seemed a big issue to me. So in many cases, I use a makefile with one of the github actions to run a makefile. It has worked okay in the few cases I've tried it.

The downside to this approach is that you have to wait longer for things to pass compared to certain actions. For example, linting can be run in seconds with an action. If you instead clone and install dependencies before linting, you’re waiting much longer to realize you have more whitespace than you should have

You could create multiple tasks that aren’t dependent on each other to run? You could still have the main build task but also split it up into multiple tasks.