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I hate GitHub Actions with passion

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Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#111

Post by dweekly »

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…

Are there solutions to this like https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ssh-to-github-action-... ?

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#112

Post by BirAdam »

In general, I've never really experienced the issues mentioned, but I also use Gitea with Actions rather than GitHub. I also avoid using any complex logic within an Action.

For the script getting run, there's one other thing. I build my containers locally, test the scripts thoroughly, and those scripts and container are what are then used in the build and deploy via Action. As the entire environment is the same, I haven't encountered many issues at all.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#113

Post by Storment33 »

jerf wrote: post #78

I think this is a specific example of a generalized mistake, one that various bits of our infrastructure and architecture all but beg us to make, over and over, and which must be resisted, which is: Your development feedback loop must be as tight as possible. Granted, if you are working on "Windows 12", you won't be building, installing, testing, and deploying that locally. I understand and acknowledge that "as tight…

Yes exactly! I am using Nix/Make and I can prompt Claude to use Nix/Make, it uses these local feedback loops and corrects itself sometimes etc.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#114

Post by gen220 »

If you wanted a better version of GitHub Actions/CI (the orchestrator, the job definition interface, or the programming of scripts to execute inside those jobs), it would presumably need to be more opinionated and have more constraints?

Who here has been thinking about this problem? Have you come up with any interesting ideas? What's the state of the art in this space?

GHA was designed in ~2018. What would it look like if you designed it today, with all we know now?

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#115

Post by palata »

mrweasel wrote: post #39

The love for Github Actions dissipated fast, it wasn't that long ago we had to read about how amazing Github Actions where. What changed?

I think it made CI management more accessible.

Before that, most people would avoid Jenkins and probably never try Buildbot (because devs typically don't want to spend any time learning tools). Devs would require "devops" to do the CI stuff. Again, mostly because they couldn't be arsed to make it themselves, but also because it required setting up a machine (do you self-host, do you use a VPS?).

Then came tools like Travis or CircleCI, which made it more accessible. "Just write some kind of script and we run it on our machines". Many devs started using that.

And then came GitHub Actions, which were a lot better than Travis and CircleCI: faster, more machines, and free (for open source projects at least). I was happy to move everything there.

But as soon as something becomes more accessible, you get people who had never done it before. They can't say "it enables me to do it, so it's better than me relying on a devops team before" or "well it's better than my experience with Travis". They will just complain because it's not perfect.

And for the OP's defense, I do agree that not being able to SSH into a machine after the build fails is very frustrating.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#117

Post by lionkor »

bandrami wrote: post #97
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.

This is giving "Debian systemd units call their old init.d scripts" energy but I kind of like it

systemd units that are small, simple, and call into a single script are usually fantastic. There's no reason for these scripts to be part of another init system; but making as much of your code completely agnostic to the env it runs in sounds good regardless. I think that's the feeling you're feeling.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#118

Post by Storment33 »

maliker wrote: post #110
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…

I've standardized on getting github actions to create/pull a docker image and run build/test inside that. So if something goes wrong I have a decent live debug environment that's very similar to what github actions is running. For what it's worth.

I was doing something similar when moving from Earthly. But I have since moved to Nix to manage the environment. It is a lot better of a developer experience and faster! I would checkout an environment manager like Nix/Mise etc so you can have the same tools etc locally and on CI.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#119

Post by lionkor »

BirAdam wrote: post #112

In general, I've never really experienced the issues mentioned, but I also use Gitea with Actions rather than GitHub. I also avoid using any complex logic within an Action. For the script getting run, there's one other thing. I build my containers locally, test the scripts thoroughly, and those scripts and container are what are then used in the build and deploy via Action. As the entire environment is the same, I ha…

That sounds sane and also completely different from GH Actions.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#120

Post by never_inline »

Storment33 wrote: post #44
never_inline wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build a CLI in python or whatever which does the same thing as CI, every CI stage should just call its subcommands.

Just use a task runner(Make, Just, Taskfile) this is what they were designed for.

In many enterprise environments, deployment logic would be quite large for bash.
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