A linter can catch some obvious errors: https://github.com/rhysd/actionlint. But yes, I agree, it's not a fun debugging experience.
GitHub Actions could be so much better
21–30 of 238 posts
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#22The 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…
Yeah, it seems like we lost a lot of the "CI shouldn't be a snowflake" when we started creating teams that specialize in "DevOps" and "DevOps tools." Once something becomes a career, I think you've hit the turning point of "this thing is going to become too complicated." I see the same thing with capital-A Agile and all the career scrum masters needing something to do with their time.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#23As someone who has recently sunk a considerable amount of time in modernizing some pipelines, workflows, what have you, I feel this deep in my bones. The commit-test-fail-recommit test loop is painful and something I’ve experienced all too well. Trying to work around product limitations brought about by whoever concocted the system on GitHub’s side to save customers from themselves and declared it good is painful. Trying to debug simple issues is painful. I’m glad I’m not alone.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#24There are two types of github actions workflows you can build.
1) Program with github actions. Google "how can I send an email with github actions?" and then plug in some marketplace tool to do it. Your workflows grow to 500-1000 lines and start having all sorts of nonsense like conditionals and the YAML becomes disgusting and hard to understand. Github actions becomes a nightmare and you've invited vendor lock in.
2) Configure with github actions. Always ask yourself "can I push this YAML complexity into a script?" and do it if you can. Send an email? Yes, that can go in a script. Your workflow ends up being about 50-60 lines as a result and very rarely needs to be changed once you've set up. Github actions is suddenly fine and you rarely have to do that stupid push-debug-commit loop because you can debug the script locally.
Every time I join a new team I tell them that 1 is the way to madness and 2 is the sensible approach and they always tepidly agree with me and yet about half of the time they still do 1.
The thing is, the lack of debugging tools provided by Microsoft is also really not much of a problem if you do 2, vendor lock in is lower if you do 2, debugging is easier if you do 2 but still nobody does 2.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#25gitlab-runner allows you to run scripts locally for GitLab, but even that is lacking (any env secrets stored in GitLab? Script is going to fail).
I really, really wish there was a way to clone the GitHub Actions or GitLab runner environment, spin up a runner locally and test. That would shave off 95% of the wait time
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#26The 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…
If folks just had actions target make or bash scripts instead of turning actions into bash scripts none of this would be an issue. Your CI/CD and your devs should all use the same targets/commands like `make release`.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#27It's hard for me to articulate exactly why but I really dislike the information layout in GH Actions. Compared to other CI/CD tools, it's harder to debug problems or get a sense of the state of a pipeline. Part of the problem is the number of clicks it takes to look at various step logs. Some of the controls are unintuitive, but maybe that's just me.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#28What's the technology behind the blog? It's clean, minimal and beautiful.
Jekyll
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#29This is a real problem. I think the problem stems from the unasserted assumption that declarative YAML is not really coding/debugging. The root problem is the assumption that infrastructure specifications are second-class citizens when it comes to managing a software ecosystem. Due to this, one rarely sees any sort of strong tooling support for creating, updating, debugging and extending various infrastructure activities. The unpleasant truth is that we live in the dark primitive days of infrastructure management.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#30It's hard for me to articulate exactly why but I really dislike the information layout in GH Actions. Compared to other CI/CD tools, it's harder to debug problems or get a sense of the state of a pipeline. Part of the problem is the number of clicks it takes to look at various step logs. Some of the controls are unintuitive, but maybe that's just me.
This could be said for a lot of GitHub. The fact that you need to open a disclosure menu to edit a PR is wild.