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Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

github.com

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Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#121

Post by tyropita »

montroser wrote: post #94

We have used this many times during GitHub outages. It's great and does what it says. But just one word of warning: when you run `act` with no arguments, what does it do? Displays usage? Nope -- it runs all workflows defined in the repo, all at once in parallel! This seems like a crazy default to me. I've never wanted to do anything remotely like that, so it just seems both dangerous and inconvenient all at once. Nic…

It was indeed very unexpected. The first time you would try out a cli tool you’d expect just calling its name to return help info and maybe an error.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#122

Post by vbezhenar »

tyropita wrote: post #121
montroser wrote: post #94

We have used this many times during GitHub outages. It's great and does what it says. But just one word of warning: when you run `act` with no arguments, what does it do? Displays usage? Nope -- it runs all workflows defined in the repo, all at once in parallel! This seems like a crazy default to me. I've never wanted to do anything remotely like that, so it just seems both dangerous and inconvenient all at once. Nic…

It was indeed very unexpected. The first time you would try out a cli tool you’d expect just calling its name to return help info and maybe an error.

/sbin/reboot would surprise you.

Use --help for help info.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#123

Post by hardwaregeek »

I really really want to use this but it doesn't work with podman which is unfortunately a bit of a blocker. IMO every CI system should be runnable locally, with minimum effort. Otherwise you end up testing via git push and that's just an ugly development cycle.

This does make me wonder if you could create a sort of "local first CI" where CI is just an extension of local checks. Therefore the CI is just a check that tests that pass locally also pass on a clean machine. Obviously we don't want to run CI locally if it'd take an hour, but on the flip side, if CI takes an hour on a (typically) beefy local dev machine, it'll probably take 2 hours on a remote machine.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#125

Post by maxloh »

zingar wrote: post #43

I’ve been playing with Act but I find it’s slower to run locally on my M1 MacBook than it is to just push things up to github to run. Edit: also, why does it run things as root instead of with a use set up the same way as actions?

You can use "/linux/ubuntu/runner" images https://github.com/catthehacker/docker_images

Seems like the documentation is a little bit hard to find.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#126

Post by k0k0r0 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #122
tyropita wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was indeed very unexpected. The first time you would try out a cli tool you’d expect just calling its name to return help info and maybe an error.

/sbin/reboot would surprise you. Use --help for help info.

Funniest reply I read in a while

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#127

Post by reillyse »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #123

I really really want to use this but it doesn't work with podman which is unfortunately a bit of a blocker. IMO every CI system should be runnable locally, with minimum effort. Otherwise you end up testing via git push and that's just an ugly development cycle. This does make me wonder if you could create a sort of "local first CI" where CI is just an extension of local checks. Therefore the CI is just a check that t…

Super interesting you mention “local first CI”. Have a look at Brisk https://brisktest.com/ (I’m the author).

It’s designed to work “locally” pre-commit, giving you super fast tests, but then when you push you can also use it in your CI/CD pipeline.

We achieve the speed with massive concurrency and pre-built environments, it was built as a drop in replacement for your local test runner.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#128

Post by Xelynega »

counttheforks wrote: post #103
ta988 wrote: post #101

This piece of software would have to handle all the intricacies of the GitHub actions but also be updated to the latest changes... We are moving back to a makefile based approach that is called by the GitHub workflows. We can handle different levels of parallelism: the make kind or the indexed by worker number when running in actions. That way we can test things locally, we can still have 32 workers on GitHub to run…

Is this public?

You could implement something similar by splitting the make targets in the GitHub action before they get passed to make so each worker is assigned their own target, then have a make target that executes all the targets for local multithreaded builds via `make -j${NUM_CONCURRENT}`.

Re: Act: Run your GitHub Actions locally

#130

Post by hardwaregeek »

reillyse wrote: post #127
hardwaregeek wrote: post #123

I really really want to use this but it doesn't work with podman which is unfortunately a bit of a blocker. IMO every CI system should be runnable locally, with minimum effort. Otherwise you end up testing via git push and that's just an ugly development cycle. This does make me wonder if you could create a sort of "local first CI" where CI is just an extension of local checks. Therefore the CI is just a check that t…

Super interesting you mention “local first CI”. Have a look at Brisk https://brisktest.com/ (I’m the author). It’s designed to work “locally” pre-commit, giving you super fast tests, but then when you push you can also use it in your CI/CD pipeline. We achieve the speed with massive concurrency and pre-built environments, it was built as a drop in replacement for your local test runner.

Awesome! Glad to see people are thinking the same things. I'll definitely check it out.
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