action-tmate

A lot of the pain of GitHub Actions gets much better using tools like action-tmate: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate As soon as I need more than two tries to get some workflow working, I set up a tmate session and debug things using a proper remote shell. It doesn't solve all the pain points, but it makes things a lot better.

I'm using tmate for this: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

could have just used https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

An easier way to debug Github Actions is to use tmate [0]. In short, you can set up an action that allows you to tmate into the worker on failure and then figure out what's wrong. In addition to the default setup, it's recommended to limit access with an SSH key [1]. [0] https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate [1] https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate?tab=readme-ov-file...

In addition to the suggestions others have made for locally testing workflows, there are also reverse shell actions[0] that can be used for troubleshooting CI failures on the GH runners themselves. [0] https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

You might also be interested in https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate, which enables SSH to workers for debugging. If you have trouble reproducing issues on CI, this can be a life saver (or at least save a few hours of commit-push-wait rounds).

Been through that git commit; git push; repeat cycle too much as well until i discovered https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate which gives a shell in between steps, which does not help with all problems but sure it's makes it less painful at times.

Unfortunately act is only capable of running very simple workflows. I've found this action to be more useful against the endless PR stream: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate You drop it in your workflow and get an SSH shell into the worker, figure things out iteratively, then push when it's working.

Yeah, you're right, there is a tool called act[1] that lets users test the GitHub Actions CI runs toward their local machine. The implementation looks very similar to GitHub Actions official runner, e.g use the identical provisioning scripts[2]. It is a very nice tool but serves a different purpose than us. Regarding general testability with GitHub Actions, I'd recommend checking out the tmate action[3], which lets you debug your CI run with SSH. [1] https://github.com/nektos/act [2] https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments [3] https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

It's pretty easy to do with github actions. https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

This definitely isn't the best way because it's far from painless, but we use GitHub Actions to run some Ansible playbooks. When there's a problem that needs debugging we add a tmate[0] session with mxschmitt's action[1] so we can step through the playbook, etc. [0]: https://tmate.io/ [1]: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

Thought I'd get their docs updated - https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate#manually-triggered...

I use tmate[1] to get a shell on the worker when I need to debug things interactively. Also act[2] lets you run a decent approximation of your actions locally. Still agree that it should be easier and not require third-party tools/actions, though. [1]: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate [2]: https://github.com/nektos/act

GitHub Actions provide another option for testing against macOS: See action-tmate [1] and fastmac [2] for reference, as well as previous discussion on HN [3]. [1]: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate [2]: https://github.com/fastai/fastmac [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24452384