The Pain That Is GitHub Actions

I was updating an old action last night to update gh pages and it’s from peaceiris. And it’s not bad, it did the job. But it feels kinda weird.

GitHub Actions started off great as they were quickly iterating, but it very much seems that GitHub has taken its eye of the ball and the improvements have all but halted.

It's really upsetting how little attention Actions is getting these days (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/act...> tells the story -- the most popular issues have gone completely unanswered).

Sad to see Earthly halting development and Dagger jumping on the AI train :(. Hopefully we'll get a proper alternative.

On a related note, if you're considering https://www.blacksmith.sh/, you really should consider https://depot.dev/. We evaluated both but went with Depot because the team is insanely smart and they've solved some pretty neat challenges. One of the cooler features is that their caching works with the default actions/cache action. There's absolutely no need to switch out popular third party actions in favor of patched ones.

This was an interesting read and highlighted some of the author's top-of-mind pain points and rough edges. However, in my experience, this is definitely not an exhaustive list, and there are actually many, many, many more.

Things like 10 GB cache limits in GitHub, concurrency limits based on runner type, the expensive price tag for larger GitHub runners, and that's before you even get to the security ones.

Having been building Depot[0] for the past 2.5 years, I can say there are so many foot guns in GitHub Actions that you don't realize until you start seeing how folks are bending YAML workflows to their will.

We've been quite surprised by the `container` job. Namely, folks want to try to use it to create a reproducible CI sandbox for their build to happen in. But it's surprisingly difficult to work with. Permissions are wonky, Docker layer caching is slow and limited, and paths don't quite work as you thought they did.

With Depot, we've been focusing on making GitHub Actions exponentially faster and removing as many of these rough edges as possible.

We started by making Docker image builds exponentially faster, but we have now brought that architecture and performance to our own GHA runners [1]. Building up and optimizing the compute and processes around the runner to make jobs extremely fast, like making caching 2-10x faster without having to replace or use any special cache actions of ours. Our Docker image builders are right next door on dedicated compute with fast caching, making the `container` job a lot better because we can build the image quickly, and then you can use that image right from our registry in your build job.

All in all, GHA is wildly popular. But, the sentiment around even it's biggest fans is that it could be a lot better.

[0] https://depot.dev/

[1] https://depot.dev/products/github-actions

Actions have special integration with GitHub (e.g. they can annotate the pull request review UI) using an API. If you forgo that integration, then you can absolutely use GitHub Actions like "a container you run scripts in." This is the advice that is usually given in every thread about GitHub Actions.

I might have missed the news, but I did not find anything in regards to earthly stopping development

What happened there?