nektos

act

Go2019–2026

nektos / act

act

Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

DevOps & Cloud

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95Distinct people

111Mentions

3Explicit recommenders

72.7KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

You can run your own github actions compatible-ish server. https://github.com/nektos/act Personally my favorite is probably drone-ci. I'd suggest not buying in too hard on any…

traverseda used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

mxschmitt/action-tmate · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 8:03:49 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year111 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-01-15 16:26:09 UTC to 2026-08-17 14:54:15 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	4	4	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	2	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	18	2	16
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	17	1	16
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	23	0	23
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	0	6
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	24	3	21
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	16	1	15

What Hacker News says

23 sources

creesch·Nov 21, 2023

Being able to run your pipelines locally is a pretty neat use case. That's something that often is difficult or basically impossible. Except for maybe GitHub actions through Act (https://github.com/nektos/act). I'd still lean to something in the yaml sphere if it eventually would be used in deployment pipelines and such. For example a solution incorporating ansible. It also seems to me that the argument you make is mostly focused on the building step? Earthly certainly seems focused on that aspect.

In Streamlining CI/CD Pipelines with Code

mdaniel·Nov 13, 2023

I feel I'm being trolled, but I'll bite and accept the resulting downvotes I don't think treating every mention of act as an opportunity for airing of personal grievances is helpful in a discussion when there's already ample reports of people's concrete issues with it, had one looked at the 800 issues in its repo https://github.com/nektos/act/issues?q=is%3Aissue or the 239 from gitea's for https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner/issues or whatever is going on with Forgejo's fork https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/act . But, as for me specifically, there are two and a half answers: I wanted to run VSCodium's build locally, which act for sure puked about. Then, while trying to troubleshoot that, I thought I'd try something simpler and have it run the lint job from act's own repo <https://github.com/nektos/act/blob/1252e551b8672b1e16dc8835d...> to

Read the rest

rule out "you're holding it wrong" type junk. It died with [checks/lint] Failure - Main actions/setup-go@v3 [checks/lint] failed to create exec: Error response from daemon: Container b9059f831d3a1549c9902cabc7e5258231b2a7291b2692eaa33f976794059738 is not running and no amount of --verbose would tell me what, specifically, "Failure" means or what action I'm supposed to take about it Finally, I believe I am pretty self-service when projects are written in sane programming languages and publish under a permissive license, so the "and a half" is that I tried to introduce some better logging or fix up some of the more egregious silliness that I found in the codebase, but ultimately it felt like I was pushing a boulder uphill so I let that go. I haven't been following the progress of any of the 1100 forks on GH, or the hundreds of Gitea forks, or whatever the hell is going on with Forgejo nowadays But my experience is that if the thing can't run its own workflows, or at least emit some constructive action that I, the user, can take about that situation, then the VSCodium one that I linked to has no prayer

In GitHub Actions Are a Problem

slenk·Nov 12, 2023

You should check out: https://github.com/nektos/act Works pretty well for the actions I have used it on.

In GitHub Actions Are a Problem

SOLAR_FIELDS·Nov 12, 2023

It’s easy to look at the endgame. Just look at the hurdles https://github.com/nektos/act has to work with

In GitHub Actions Are a Problem

ttfkam·Nov 12, 2023

Why not just use act? It was made for this exact set of problems? https://github.com/nektos/act

In GitHub Actions Are a Problem

westurner·Nov 10, 2023

From https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 : > GitHub Actions currently charges $0.16 *per minute* for the macOS M1 Runners. That comes out to $84,096 for 1 machine year GitHub Runner is written in Go; it fetches tasks from GitHub Actions and posts the results back to the Pull Request that spawned the build. nektos/act is how Gitea Actions builds GitHub Actions workflow YAML build definition documents. https://github.com/nektos/act From https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/17200423527675700... : > This is the macOS Ventura installer running in 30 VMs, in 30 #nix derivations at once. It gets the installer from Apple, automates the installation using Tesseract OCR and TCL Expect scripts. This is to test the repeatability. A single function call `makeDarwinImage`. With a Multi-Stage Dockerfile/Containerfild, you can

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have a dev environment like xcode or gcc+make in the first stage that builds the package, and then the second stage the package is installed and tested, and then the package is signed and published to a package repo / app store / OCI container image repository. Continuous integration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration Is there a good way to do automated testing like pytest+Hypothesis+tox w/ e.g. the Swift programming language for computers? CloudFuzz is built upon OSS-Fuzz. SLSA now specifies builders for signing things correctly in CI builds with keys in RAM on the build workers. "Build your own SLSA 3+ provenance builder on GitHub Actions" https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-builder-github

In Apple’s first online store played a crucial role in the company’s resurgence

dboreham·Nov 6, 2023

Also this exists: https://github.com/nektos/act which is conveniently packaged in a GH-a-like system by: https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner in https://github.com/go-gitea

In Cicada – Open-source cross-platform version of GitHub Actions and Gitlab CI

srevinsaju·Oct 24, 2023

Yes, I have been taking a look at https://github.com/nektos/act which allows running github actions workflow locally. I am investigating if I can integrate it directly in togomak, so that users can reuse existing github action in their pipeline. For the most bit, these pipelines run in node docker containers. I'm hoping to add a concept called "operator" where you can specify or use multiple build backends like Google Cloud Build, or GitHub Actions.

In Show HN: Togomak – declarative pipeline orchestrator based on HCL and Terraform

all2·Sep 23, 2023

There are ways to run GHA locally. I've tried out one or two of the tools. [0] - [0] https://github.com/nektos/act

In GitHub Actions could be so much better

bdcravens·Sep 22, 2023

Act can do most of it locally https://github.com/nektos/act

In GitHub Actions could be so much better

hahn-kev·Sep 22, 2023

Check this out. It doesn't do everything but it's decent https://github.com/nektos/act

In GitHub Actions could be so much better

dmtryshmtv·Sep 22, 2023

Good perspective. Unfortunately (1) is unavoidable when you're trying to automate GH itself (role assignments, tagging, etc.). But at this point, I would rather handle a lot of that manually than deal with GHA's awful debug loop. FWIW, there's nektos/act[^1], which aims to duplicate GHA behavior locally, but I haven't tried it yet. [^1]: https://github.com/nektos/act

In GitHub Actions could be so much better

bastardoperator·Sep 22, 2023

act would also be helpful here in terms of debugging and development of Actions workflows. https://github.com/nektos/act

In GitHub Actions could be so much better

tao_at_garden·Sep 22, 2023

The git commit, push, wait loop is terrible UX. Users deserve portable pipelines that run anywhere, including their local machines. I understand Act [1] goes some way to solving this headache but it's by and large not a true representation. There are many pipelines you can't run locally, because they're production, for example, but there's no reason why we can't capture these workflows to run them locally at less-critical stages of development. Garden offers portable pipelines and then adds caching across your entire web of dependencies. Some of our customers see 80% or higher reductions in run times plus devs get that immediate feedback on what tests are failing or passing without pushing to git first using our Garden Workflows. We're OSS. [2] [1] https://github.com/nektos/act [2] https://docs.garden.io

In GitHub Actions could be so much better

vegardx·Sep 22, 2023

There's tools like Act[0] that tries to solve this, but this has been an issue with CI systems since they were invented. [0] https://github.com/nektos/act

In GitHub Actions could be so much better

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