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I hate GitHub Actions with passion

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Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#141

Post by palata »

Nextgrid wrote: post #133
palata wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the SourceHut CI, because: 1. When the build fails, you can SSH into the machine and debug it from there. 2. You can super easily edit & run the manifest without having to push to a branch at all. That makes it super easy to even try a minimum reproducible example on the remote machine. Other than that, self-hosting (with Github or preferrably Forgejo) makes it easy to debug on the machine, but then you…

Self-hosted runners with Github is a whole world of pain because it literally just runs commands on the host and does not handle provisioning/cleanup, meaning you need to make sure your `docker run` commands don't leave any leftover state that can mess up future/concurrent builds. It doesn't even handle concurrency by itself, so you have to run multiple instances of the runner.

That was included in my "but then you have to self-host" :-).

As I said, I really like the SourceHut CI.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#142

Post by lawrencegripper »

echelon wrote: post #103
woodruffw wrote: post #89

I think this post accurately isolates the single main issue with GitHub Actions, i.e. the lack of a tight feedback loop. Pushing and waiting for completion on what's often a very simple failure mode is frustrating. Others have pointed out that there are architectural steps you can take to minimize this pain, like keeping all CI operations isolated within scripts that can be run locally (and treating GitHub Actions fe…

We need SSH access to the failed instances so we can poke around and iterate from any step in the workflow. Production runs should be immutable, but we should be able to get in to diagnose, edit, and retry. It'd lead to faster diagnosis, resolution, and fixing. The logs and everything should be there for us. And speaking of the logs situation, the GHA logs are really buggy sometimes. They don't load about half of the…

I wrote something recently with webrtc to get terminal on failure: https://blog.gripdev.xyz/2026/01/10/actions-terminal-on-fail...

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#143

Post by normie3000 »

normie3000 wrote: post #140
grugdev42 wrote: post #135

I know GitHub Actions won the war, but I think Bitbucket Pipelines are much nicer to work with. They just seem simpler and less fragile. But almost every company uses GitHub, and changing to Bitbucket isn't usually viable.

The main downside of bitbucket pipelines is bitbucket. And the only significant feature I recall over GitHub Actions is that Pipelines support cron jobs.

Reading the rest of the thread, it looks like Actions also has cron jobs.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#144

Post by anttiharju »

Issue is, op is trying to use matrix strategy when with cross-compiling they could avoid it. I have done it for https://github.com/anttiharju/compare-changes (which has nontrivial CI pipelines but they could be a lot simpler for op's needs)

Main issue is Rust. Writing catchy headlines about hating something may feel good, but a lot of people could avoid these pains if

- zig cc gets support for new linker flag that Rust requires https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/pulls/30628 - rust-lang/libc gets to 1.0 which removes iconv issues for macos https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/issues/3248

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#145

Post by rurp »

palata wrote: post #98
smetj wrote: post #90

Its not Github Actions' fault but the horrors people create in it, all under the pretense that automation is simply about wrapping a GitHub Action around something. Learn to create a script in Python or similar and put all logic there so you can execute it locally and can port it to the next CI system when a new CTO arrives.

I think in this case they hate the fact that they cannot easily SSH into the failing VM and debug from there. Like "I have to edit my workflow, push it, wait for it to run and fail, and repeat".

Yep, my company moved onto GH Actions a few years ago and this was probably the single biggest pain point. But also the whole system just feels awkward and annoying to work with. It feels like a classic Microsoft product that would never get traction from a standalone company but because it's part of Microsoft/GitHub and is "good enough" lots of people put up with it.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#146

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Storment33 wrote: post #85
embedding-shape wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But personally so far everytime I have come across something not using a task runner it has just been the wrong decision. Yeah, tends to happen a lot when you hold strong opinions with strong conviction :) Not that it's wrong or anything, but it's highly subjective in the end. Typically I see larger issues being created from "under-engineering" and just rushing with the first idea people can think of when they impl…

> Yeah, tends to happen a lot when you hold strong opinions with strong conviction :) Not that it's wrong or anything, but it's highly subjective in the end. Strong opinions, loosely held :) > Typically I see larger issues being created from "under-engineering" and just rushing with the first idea people can think of when they implement things, rather than "over-engineering" Funnily enough running with the first idea…

> It introduces more dependencies(Python which I solved via Nix) but others haven't solved this problem and the Python script has dependencies(such as Click for the CLI).

UV scripts are great for this type of workflow

There are even scripts which will install uv in the same file effectively making it just equivalent to ./run-file.py and it would handle all the dependency management the python version management and everything included and would work everywhere

https://paulw.tokyo/standalone-python-script-with-uv/

Personally I end up just downloading uv and so not using the uv download script from this but if I am using something like github action which are more (ephemeral?) I'd just do this.

Something like this can start out simple and can scale much more than the limitations of bash which can be abundant at times

That being said, I still make some shell scripts because executing other applications is first class support in bash but not so much in python but after discovering this I might create some new scripts with python with automated uv because I end up installing uv on many devices anyway (because uv's really good for python)

I am interested in bun-shell as well but that feels way too much bloated and even not used by many so less (AI assistance at times?) and I haven't understood bun shell at the same time too and so bash is superior to it usually

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#147

Post by anttiharju »

anttiharju wrote: post #144

Issue is, op is trying to use matrix strategy when with cross-compiling they could avoid it. I have done it for https://github.com/anttiharju/compare-changes (which has nontrivial CI pipelines but they could be a lot simpler for op's needs) Main issue is Rust. Writing catchy headlines about hating something may feel good, but a lot of people could avoid these pains if - zig cc gets support for new linker flag that Ru…

This also helps one to avoid the expensive macos runners

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#148

Post by quotemstr »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #146
Storment33 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, tends to happen a lot when you hold strong opinions with strong conviction :) Not that it's wrong or anything, but it's highly subjective in the end. Strong opinions, loosely held :) > Typically I see larger issues being created from "under-engineering" and just rushing with the first idea people can think of when they implement things, rather than "over-engineering" Funnily enough running with the first idea…

> It introduces more dependencies(Python which I solved via Nix) but others haven't solved this problem and the Python script has dependencies(such as Click for the CLI). UV scripts are great for this type of workflow There are even scripts which will install uv in the same file effectively making it just equivalent to ./run-file.py and it would handle all the dependency management the python version management and e…

This thing does a global uv install when run? That's obnoxious! Never running stuff from whoever wrote this.

Oh, and later the author suggests the script modify itself after running. What the fuck. Absolutely unacceptable way to deploy software.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#149

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Wrote a comment to someone here but I thought of deciding to make a main comment here as well

Note that I don't really use github actions much but have heard about its architecture

From my understanding, I feel like Github actions should just be a call to some bash or python file. Bash has its issues so I prefer python

I recommend people to take a look at https://paulw.tokyo/standalone-python-script-with-uv/ and please tell me if something like this might be perfect for python scripts in github actions as this script would automatically install uv, get all the dependencies of python and even the runtime I think and then execute the python code all while being very managable usually and it can run locally as well

The only Issue I feel like I might have with this is say why go something with this complex when bash exists or the performance concerns of installing uv but considering its github actions, I feel like the latter is ruled out.

Bash is good as well but bash has some severe limitations. and I feel like Python can be good case for something like this plus its ecosystem is a bit mature and you could even create web servers or have some logs be reported to your custom server or automate just basically everything

To me this script feels like the best of both worlds and something genuinely sane to build upon.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#150

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

ethin wrote: post #83
embedding-shape wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your CI can do things that you can't do locally: that is a problem. Probably most of the times when this is an actual problem, is building across many platforms. I'm running Linux x86_64 locally, but some of my deliverables are for macOS and Windows and ARM, and while I could cross-compile for all of them on Linux (macOS was a bitch to get working though), it always felt better to compile on the hardware I'm tar…

I literally had to do this push > commit > test loop yesterday because apparently building universal Python wheels on MacOS is a pain in the ass. And I don't have a mac, so if I want to somewhat reliably reproduce how the runner might behave, I have to either test it on GH actions or rent one from something like Scaleway. Mainly because I don't currently knwo how else to do it. It's so, so frustrating and if anyone h…

there is quickemu which can install mac vm on linux (or any other host) rather quickly, what are your thoughts on it (I am an absolute quickemu shill because I love that software)

https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu [ Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines ]

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