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GitHub Actions could be so much better

blog.yossarian.net

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71–80 of 238 posts

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#71

Post by dmtryshmtv »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #24

There 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…

Good perspective. Unfortunately (1) is unavoidable when you're trying to automate GH itself (role assignments, tagging, etc.). But at this point, I would rather handle a lot of that manually than deal with GHA's awful debug loop.

FWIW, there's nektos/act[^1], which aims to duplicate GHA behavior locally, but I haven't tried it yet.

[^1]: https://github.com/nektos/act

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#72

Post by nafizh »

woodruffw wrote: post #33
nafizh wrote: post #15

What's the technology behind the blog? It's clean, minimal and beautiful.

It's a Jekyll site. I originally built it off of a popular theme (back in 2014 or so), but these days the theme is just a custom thing that I've cobbled together. (So, in a sense, there's no real technology "behind" it. It's just Markdown with a little HTML templating, with Jekyll as the SSG.)

Thanks for the reply. Is the code available by any chance?

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#73

Post by ctoth »

One thing that actually makes this slightly less horrible is the Gh tool. You can use gh run watch to tail your logs in the terminal and at least don't have to click through a million things just to see output.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#74

Post by pid-1 »

joshstrange wrote: post #32

I couldn't agree more with the pain of debugging a GH Actions run. The /only/ tool you have is the ability to re-run with debug on. That's it. I have so many "trash" commits trying to fix or debug a pipeline and so much of it's just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks. Very basic things, like having reusable logic, is needlessly complex or poorly documented. Once I figured out how to do it it was fairly ea…

If only competitors could do better...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/2797

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#75

Post by riquito »

MoreQARespect wrote: post #24

There 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…

I agree overall, but you oversimplify the issue a bit.

> can I push this YAML complexity into a script?

- what language is the script written in?

- will developers use the same language for all those scripts?

- does it need dependencies?

- where are we going to host scripts used by multiple github actions?

- if we ended up putting those scripts in repositories, how do we update the actions once we release new version of the scripts?

- how do you track those versions?

- how much does it cost to write a separate script and maintain it versus locking us in with an external github action?

These are just the first questions that pop in my mind, but there is more. And some answers may not be that difficult, yet is still something to think about.

And I agree with the core idea (move logic outside pipeline configuration), but I can understand the tepid reaction you may get. Is not free and you compromise on some things

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#78

Post by hahn-kev »

joshstrange wrote: post #32

I couldn't agree more with the pain of debugging a GH Actions run. The /only/ tool you have is the ability to re-run with debug on. That's it. I have so many "trash" commits trying to fix or debug a pipeline and so much of it's just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks. Very basic things, like having reusable logic, is needlessly complex or poorly documented. Once I figured out how to do it it was fairly ea…

Check this out. It doesn't do everything but it's decent https://github.com/nektos/act

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#79

Post by chrissoundz »

Struggling with this today, and numerous other days. It's so bad. Stop trying to build an operating system out of YAML. I'll always use and recommend Gitlab from now on.

And what the earth is an "actions" anyway? How on earth is simple bash functions not just as suitable here? Instead you have some weird YAML scripting language. It's so bad. Why. Somebody please tell me. I'm losing my mind. It is a good reflection of the rest of the world though and why the worlds infrastructure is crumbling in many places.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#80

Post by watermelon0 »

My number one complaint is that they still don't have managed ARM runners. Considering how overpriced runners are (compared to cloud instances), I'm sure they would make a ton of money here.

My choices here are either to use a different CI solution (but I quite like Actions, and they are better integrated in the Github UI than alternatives), or to use custom self-hosted autoscaling runners (but there doesn't appear to be a good solution available at the moment, and I definitely don't want to managed infra for CI.)

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