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I hate GitHub Actions with passion

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Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#121

Post by embedding-shape »

palata wrote: post #104
embedding-shape wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best CI platforms let you "Rebuild with SSH" or something similar, and instead of having the cycle of "change > commit > push > wait > see results" (when you're testing CI specific stuff, not iterating on Makefiles or whatever, assuming most of it is scripts you can run both locally and in CI), you get a URL to connect to while the job is running, so you can effectively ensure manually it works, then just copy-pa…

I use that a lot with SourceHut: after a build fails, you have 10 minutes to SSH into the machine and debug from there. Also they have a very nice "edit manifest and run" feature that makes it easy to quickly test a change while debugging. Are there other platforms allowing that? Genuinely interested.

> after a build fails, you have 10 minutes to SSH into the machine and debug from there.

Ah, that's like 90% of the way there, just need to enable so the SSH endpoint is created at the beginning, rather than the end, so you could for example watch memory usage and stuff while the "real" job is running in the same instance.

But great to hear they let you have access to the runner at all, only that fact makes it a lot better than most CI services out there, creds to SourceHut.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#122

Post by palata »

embedding-shape wrote: post #121
palata wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use that a lot with SourceHut: after a build fails, you have 10 minutes to SSH into the machine and debug from there. Also they have a very nice "edit manifest and run" feature that makes it easy to quickly test a change while debugging. Are there other platforms allowing that? Genuinely interested.

> after a build fails, you have 10 minutes to SSH into the machine and debug from there. Ah, that's like 90% of the way there, just need to enable so the SSH endpoint is created at the beginning, rather than the end, so you could for example watch memory usage and stuff while the "real" job is running in the same instance. But great to hear they let you have access to the runner at all, only that fact makes it a lot…

> just need to enable so the SSH endpoint is created at the beginning

Maybe it is, I've never tried :-). I don't see a reason why not, probably it is.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#123

Post by Storment33 »

never_inline wrote: post #120
Storment33 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I have never found the Python as a task runners to be less code, more readable or maintainable.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#124

Post by woodruffw »

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.

Yeah, images seem to work very well as an abstraction layer for most CI/CD users. It's kind of unfortunate that they don't (can't) fully generalize across Windows and macOS runners as well, though, since in practice that's where a lot of people start to get snagged by needing to do things in GitHub Actions versus using GitHub Actions as an execution layer.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#125

Post by juliie »

bob1029 wrote: post #91

For the last decade I've been doing my CI/CD as simple .NET console apps that run wherever. I don't see why we switch to these wildly different technologies when the tools we are already using can do the job. Being able to run your entire "pipeline" locally with breakpoints is much more productive than whatever the hell goes on in GH Actions these days.

I can do that with github actions too? For tests, I can either run them locally (with a debugger if I want), or in github actions. Smaller checks go in a pre-commit config that github action also runs.

Setting up my github actions (or gitlab) checks in a way that can easily run locally can be a bit of extra work, but it's not difficult.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#126

Post by kstrauser »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #15

1. Don't use bash, use a scripting language that is more CI friendly. I strongly prefer pwsh. 2. Don't have logic in your workflows. Workflows should be dumb and simple (KISS) and they should call your scripts. 3. Having standalone scripts will allow you to develop/modify and test locally without having to get caught in a loop of hell. 4. Design your entire CI pipeline for easier debugging, put that print state in, e…

I was once hired to manage a build farm. All of the build jobs were huge pipelines of Jenkins plugins that did various things in various orders. It was a freaking nightmare. Never again. Since then, every CI setup I’ve touched is a wrapper around “make build” or similar, with all the smarts living in Git next to the code it was building. I’ll die on this hill.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#127

Post by wrqvrwvq »

Standard msft absurdity. 8 years later there is still no local gh action runner to test your script before you commit, push, and churn through logs, and without some 3rd party hack, no way to ssh in and debug. It doesn't matter how simple the build command you write is, because the workflow itself is totally foreign technology to most, and no one wants to be a gh action dev.

Like most of the glaring nonsense that costs people time when using msft, this is financially beneficial to msft in that each failed run counts against paid minutes. It's a racket from disgusting sleaze scum who literally hold meetings dedicated to increasing user pain because otherwise the bottom line will slip fractionally and no one in redmond has a single clue how to make money without ripping off the userbase.

Re: I hate GitHub Actions with passion

#128

Post by efrecon »

alfonsodev wrote: post #79
cesarvarela wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of GitHub actions that let you do this.

do you mean https://github.com/nektos/act or there is something else ?

No. Act is for running actions locally. What was mentioned is a way to insert an SSH step at some well-chosen point of a workflow so you can login at the runner and understand what is wrong and why it's not working. I have written one such thing, it relies on cloudflare free tunnels. https://github.com/efrecon/sshd-cloudflared. There are other solutions around to achieve more or less the same goal.
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