action-tmate VS ssh-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...

Once the image has been built and pushed, you only need to trigger the deployment using Kamal. We use the webfactory/ssh-agent to establish a connection to our production server. After installing the required Ruby dependencies, it’s only a matter of running Kamal. As the image is already built and pushed, we use the --skip-push flag.

When using Github Actions, to build projects I have been using the ssh-agent approach (https://github.com/webfactory/ssh-agent), with this means the Cargo.toml looks like this:

Thankfully when I reached out on Twitter, Jonathan Carter on the Codespaces team, seemed to suggest they may be working on a native SSH integration one day. Till then, here is the solution I came up with. This process address some sequencing issues around devcontainer.json's Lifecycle Scripts and when your Dotfiles are installed. Credit to VS Codes Using SSH Keys guide. Also, some things here are pulled directly from the GitHub Action to setup SSH. Again, thanks to Johnathan Carter for the ideas.