EdgeLord VS action-tmate

I actually really like GitHub actions, I read the article and while I get some of the concerns, others I don't understand. In any case the author's situation doesn't apply to me, and I wanted to share something I really liked about GHA.

So, I recently figured out a way to host a remote browser on them by using an Ngrok tunnel. It's really cool to see BrowserBox running from inside a GitHub action container. I literally couldn't believe it actually worked when I first figured it out!

I was so excited. It started as just this tech prototype in my mind (could this be possible? Probably not but I Feel like it could be). And to see it actually achieved so cool! :)

I thought this was so cool, and such a useful way for people to either just get started with BrowserBox trying it out, or even run a quick little VPN-like/proxy browser from another region, that I wrote an action that integrates with issues to make the process as easy as possible for people.

Basically you can just clone or fork the repo: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox and then open an issue and pick the template that is like "Make VPN". The login link will get published in the repo. The link is not private (unless you make your fork or template private) and there's a bit of setup with your ngrok API key (free is OK) but the issue conversation automatically guides you through all that.

I thought this was so cool (free server time, actually working app), that I created another version that uses MS Edge under the hood instead of Chrome in the original, just to show how easy it is: https://github.com/EdgeLord/EdgeLord

Just a niggle is that the other services we normally have (secure doc viewer, audio, remote devtools) do not work as ngrok only maps 1 port. I could use an ngrok config file I think to fix that but somehow, easy as that is, I have not gotten around to it! Another niggle is I noticed the auto-tab opening used in the GHA demo seems a little funky lately, and you may need to manually reload or resize them to un-wonkify it. Probably a little regression!

Anyway! :)

The go-to method of debugging GitHub Actions is tmate. With tmate we can connect to our running Action terminal and see what is going on there by executing some simple commands!

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

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.

In addition to everything here, I also will set up https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate when I’m debugging. It helps tremendously since you can temporarily access the server.

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.

Solution: Tip o' the hat to Daniela Baron here, there's a real life saver of tool call tmate.

Here's a recent case where users of tmate - which lets you SSH into an actions worker - reported problems: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate/issues/104

see: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

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