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GitHub Actions could be so much better
181–190 of 238 posts
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#182> And so, the question: why are there so few of them? Here is just a smattering of the official actions that don’t exist[...]
This part of the article half triggered me and half made me laugh. I was recently on a GitHub webinar to listen to the pitch for CoPilot, but of course they also talked about Actions and GHAS. Anyway, during the overview of Actions, the presenters made a comment about how Actions was "backed by the community." It felt to me like a glaring admission that the product isn't mature. But in true Microsoft fashion, they charge you like it is.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#183One 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.
Do you know a way to stream the gh run watch output?
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I was under the impression (which might be wrong!) that GH…
the original GHA implementation was shitcanned
Is that a nice way of saying we are still stuck with the original GHA implementation
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#185GitHub Actions is a horrible CI/CD system. You cannot run steps in parallel on the same VM; container-based workloads are a second-class citizen. The first problem means that setting up local credentials and other environment dependencies cannot be parallelized (I'm looking at you, google-github-actions/setup-gcloud, with your 1m+ runtime... grrr), the second makes it quite difficult to put a Dockerfile in a reposito…
Try the sourcehut build server
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate this perspective, however, after spending 6mo on a project that went (2) all the way, never again. CI/CD SHOULD NOT be using the same scripts you build with locally. Now, we have a commit that every dev must apply to the makefile to build locally, and if you accidentally push it, CI/CD will blow up (requiring an interactive rebase before every push). However, you can’t build locally without that commit.…
This comment is hard to address without understanding the details of your project, but I will at least say that it doesn't mirror my experience. Generally, I would use the same tools (e.g. ./gradlew build or docker build) to build stuff locally as on CI, and config params are typically enough to distinguish what needs to be different. My CI scripts still tend up to be more complicated than I'd like to (due to things…
Agreed. I want my builds reproducible. The CI binaries should be bit-for-bit identical to the locally-built ones.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#187GitHub Actions is a horrible CI/CD system. You cannot run steps in parallel on the same VM; container-based workloads are a second-class citizen. The first problem means that setting up local credentials and other environment dependencies cannot be parallelized (I'm looking at you, google-github-actions/setup-gcloud, with your 1m+ runtime... grrr), the second makes it quite difficult to put a Dockerfile in a reposito…
Concourse rocks. I didn't know the team had been dismantled, this sucks. Zito's communication style was the best.
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
How DO you debug your actions? I spend so long in the commit-action-debug-change loop it’s absurd. I agree with your point re: 2 wholeheartedly though, it makes debugging scripts so much easier too. CI should be runnable locally and GitHub actions, while supported with some tooling, still isn’t very easy to work with like that.
There are ways to run GHA locally. I've tried out one or two of the tools. [0] - [0] https://github.com/nektos/act
I tried Act at one point but couldn't get it to run the whole pipeline correctly, it might have improved since though so I'll try it out again soon
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#189I created https://github.com/typesafegithub/github-workflows-kt and https://github.com/typesafegithub/github-actions-typing to address some of the mentioned issues. Some problems remain unsolved because it's just a Kotlin DSL that generates the YAML, but it does catch some issues early. Related blog post: https://dev.to/jmfayard/github-actions-a-new-hope-in-yaml-wa...
Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
How DO you debug your actions? I spend so long in the commit-action-debug-change loop it’s absurd. I agree with your point re: 2 wholeheartedly though, it makes debugging scripts so much easier too. CI should be runnable locally and GitHub actions, while supported with some tooling, still isn’t very easy to work with like that.
Act works pretty well to debug actions locally. It isn't perfect, but I find it handles about 90% of the write-test-repeat loop and therefore saves my teammates from dozens of tiny test PRs.
> saves my teammates from dozens of tiny test PRs
May have misread this but you know you can push to one branch and then run the action against it? Would reduce PRs if you're doing that to then check the action in master. You have to add a workflow_dispatch to the action: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/manually-...