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GitHub Actions could be so much better

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11–20 of 238 posts

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#11
> Because GitHub fails to distinguish between fork and non-fork SHA references, forks can bypass security settings on GitHub Actions that would otherwise restrict actions to only “trusted” sources (such as GitHub themselves or the repository’s own organization).

How is this not resolved?

Easily bypassing security controls is a major security issue.

Yes, you need to convince someone to use your SHA, but social engineering is usually the easy part.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#12
post #6

I don't see how you love something that makes you jump through these hoops: > In this particular case, it took me 4 separate commits (and 4 failed releases) to debug the various small errors I made: not using ${{ ... }}5 where I needed to, forgetting a needs: relationship, &c

We use Github Actions and we just don't have any issues with it outside the first time we set it up for each repo. Then we make 100s of commits a week and it does its thing and our work goes live a few seconds later. That's why I love it. Could things be better? Of course; that's how software is--and this should resonate with most folks on this site. But just because some product isn't infallible doesn't mean we can'…

>Then we make 100s of commits a week and it does its thing and our work goes live a few seconds later.

Wow, computers doing what they're supposed to do. Pretty impressive ...

The UX on GH actions is crap, other CI/CD solutions give you way more control and tooling. GH really needs to step up their game on this one.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#13
post #4

I don't see how you love something that makes you jump through these hoops: > In this particular case, it took me 4 separate commits (and 4 failed releases) to debug the various small errors I made: not using ${{ ... }}5 where I needed to, forgetting a needs: relationship, &c

There's tools like Act[0] that tries to solve this, but this has been an issue with CI systems since they were invented. [0] https://github.com/nektos/act

Also reused by gitea for their CI runner. I was quite impressed by that feat, pretty neat.

https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just programming? That's not much different than saying you forgot a bracket and had to make another commit to make it work. Granted, it would be nice if they had some linter.

This is a usecase where chatgpt works great! I usually pass this kind of ops DSL in gpt and it will find my mistakes. Github actions and graphanaQL code, oof, they just click for me.

I'm not gonna post my employer's proprietary code into ChatGPT.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#17

The git commit, push, wait loop is terrible UX. Users deserve portable pipelines that run anywhere, including their local machines. I understand Act [1] goes some way to solving this headache but it's by and large not a true representation. There are many pipelines you can't run locally, because they're production, for example, but there's no reason why we can't capture these workflows to run them locally at less-cri…

Act's incompleteness has had me barking up the wrong tree many times. At this point I've temporarily abandoned using it in favor of the old cycle. I'm hoping it gets better in time!

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#18
I mean GH Actions is basically a re-brand of Microsoft's "Azure Pipelines". As somebody who used all previous incarnations of TFS/VSTS/AzDO build and release pipelines: they are not good at this. This is not a team with a record of success. That Azure Pipelines is moderately usable only happened because they failed literally every other approach they tried.

There was a project to allow you to run the pipelines locally so you could do the edit-run-debug loop on your own private environment without committing. It was, of course, canned.

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/pull/2687...

However, there are tools to improve QOL. For example:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-azure...

A vscode extension that's syntax-aware.

Now, I'll be a bit controversial: if they'd used XML instead of YAML, you could have an xmlns declaration up-top that would give you validation in most decent code editors without user intervention. XML is awful, but it has a lot of useful features that we gave up when we threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#19
post #7

I don't see how you love something that makes you jump through these hoops: > In this particular case, it took me 4 separate commits (and 4 failed releases) to debug the various small errors I made: not using ${{ ... }}5 where I needed to, forgetting a needs: relationship, &c

Yeah, I wouldn’t want to use any automation that you can’t also easily and quickly test locally.

Fun fact: Microsoft had a plan to provide that!

They canned it.

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/pull/2687...

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#20
The feature I'd love is history.

I'd like to know if my builds are getting slower over time. I'd be able to detect flaky tests automatically.

It seems basic, but I know third-party solutions exist for this. It's out of the box in Circle CI and Buildkite and feels like it should be here.

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