act VS runner

When it comes to the alternatives to tmate, there is another great debugging tool that you could check out. It is called act and it allows you to run GitHub Actions code on your local machine making debugging even easier. It has its own limitations and some learning curve but overall it is another tool you should use if you can’t fix the CI bugs by connecting directly into the running action with the tmate.

Link: https://github.com/nektos/act

Could you upload your build of GitHub's runner image to Docker Hub?

This would be quite useful for users of other GitHub Actions clones like act [0].

[0]: https://github.com/nektos/act

> These kinds of commit messages are typically an indicator of a broken process where somebody needs to commit to see something happen, like a deployment or build process, and aren't able to assert that stuff works locally.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with services like github actions. Something running locally like "act" [1] isn't sufficient because it doesn't have everything github has and is extra friction anyway to get everyone to use it for testing.

[1] https://github.com/nektos/act

View on GitHub

If you use Github actions, act is incredibly useful. It can be used to test your GH actions, but also serves as an interface for running tasks locally.

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.

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 rule out "you're holding it wrong" type junk. It died with

  [checks/lint]     Failure - Main actions/setup-go@v3

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

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 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.

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 the case of GitHub Actions, it's made more painful by the lack of support for YAML anchors, which provide a bare minimum of composability.

https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182

Even if you don’t pick Avalonia, their notes for Mac distribution look useful:

https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/distribution-publishing/mac...

For example, the GitHub actions runner itself is a modern .NET core project with CI except for .app packaging.

https://github.com/actions/runner/tree/main/.github/workflow...

This probably answers your question:

https://github.com/actions/runner/blob/a4c57f27477077e57545a...

$ mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner $ curl -o actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.311.0/actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 100 98.1M 100 98.1M 0 0 20.0M 0 0:00:04 0:00:04 --:--:-- 23.5M $ echo "fa2f107dbce709807bae014fb3121f5dbe106211b6bbe3484c41e3b30828d6b2 actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz" | shasum -a 256 -c actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz: OK $ tar xzf ./actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz ❯ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/dpills/devops-quick-start-guide --token AGDCRGCMZWN34QIVISIO5XXXXXX -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | | / ___(_) |_| | | |_ _| |__ / \ ___| |_(_) ___ _ __ ___ | | | | _| | __| |_| | | | | '_ \ / _ \ / __| __| |/ _ \| '_ \/ __| | | | |_| | | |_| _ | |_| | |_) | / ___ \ (__| |_| | (_) | | | \__ \ | | \____|_|\__|_| |_|\__,_|_.__/ /_/ \_\___|\__|_|\___/|_| |_|___/ | | | | Self-hosted runner registration | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Authentication √ Connected to GitHub # Runner Registration Enter the name of the runner group to add this runner to: [press Enter for Default] Enter the name of runner: [press Enter for dpills-mac] This runner will have the following labels: 'self-hosted', 'macOS', 'ARM64' Enter any additional labels (ex. label-1,label-2): [press Enter to skip] √ Runner successfully added √ Runner connection is good # Runner settings Enter name of work folder: [press Enter for _work] √ Settings Saved. ❯ ./run.sh √ Connected to GitHub Current runner version: '2.311.0' 2023-10-27 13:32:16Z: Listening for Jobs

A runner is where your action's jobs will be run. It can be a hosted virtual environment, or you can self-host a runner in your machine.

If i understand this writing correctly (https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/904), running Windows containers in a windows-latest GH Actions host is not possible. While using a self-hosted runner on a Windows server might be an option, this is not what I want since it is a package repo for a well-known open source project, think of the package repo part as a mini-Conan. I wouldn't know who would want to host that. In the best case we would stay with just GH Actions to keep everything confined in one space :)

Shameless plug for cuelang, which, among many other things, avoid this problem:

https://cuelang.org

It's not a new issue, the Python community had exactly the same surprise with 3.10: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1989