action-tmate VS azure-pipelines-agent

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...

> GitHub Actions is based on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server's CI, and later Azure DevOps

Yes and no, ADO Agent (https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent) is far more secretive and "black-box" alike.

Fun fact: Microsoft had a plan to provide that!

They canned it.

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/pull/2687...

You will need to download the agent (https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/releases/latest ) and run the configure command.

A GitHub issue was opened to track support for different Node versions with custom tasks, but it remained unresolved for a long time. In October 2022 it was announced that Node.js 16 support was available.

Even thought im in the EU datacenter, my hosted agent is version 2.213.2, which is also the latest version of the agent taht was released by MS - https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent

{ "name": "AzurePipelines", "dockerFile": "Dockerfile", // Configure tool-specific properties. "customizations": { // Configure properties specific to VS Code. "vscode": { // Add the IDs of extensions you want installed when the container is created. "extensions": [ "ms-vscode.azurecli", "ms-vscode.powershell", "hashicorp.terraform", "esbenp.prettier-vscode", "tfsec.tfsec" ] } }, // Use 'forwardPorts' to make a list of ports inside the container available locally. // "forwardPorts": [], // Use 'postStartCommand' to run commands each time the container is successfully started.. "postStartCommand": "/home/vscode/azure-pipelines/start.sh", // Comment out to connect as root instead. More info: https://aka.ms/vscode-remote/containers/non-root. "remoteUser": "vscode", // Amend Azure Pipelines agent version and arch type with 'ARCH' and 'AGENT_VERSION'. https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/releases. "build": { "args": { "UPGRADE_PACKAGES": "true", "ARCH": "x64", "AGENT_VERSION": "2.206.1" } }, "features": { "terraform": "latest", "azure-cli": "latest", "git-lfs": "latest", "github-cli": "latest", "powershell": "latest" } }

Looks like they are working on it:https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/issues/3922

Thanks for sharing this. As mentioned in this GitHub issue, the build pipeline does render PS 7.2 new color escape sequences, however release pipeline does not.