awesome-actions VS act

Awesome Actions - A curated list of awesome things related to GitHub Actions.

Since it sounds like you're using GitHub, using GitHub Actions for any CI pipelines would be easiest. You could run terraform plan in your PRs, there's a great writeup on how to do it here. Or any unit tests, docker builds, etc. Lots of great ideas at Awesome Actions.

Here is a list of some examples you might want to check out.

A curated list of actions to use on GitHub\ (6 comments)

With the recent success of Github actions you can automate lots of things whenever something in your repos changes, e.g. automatically generate static HTML content (using hugo) and push it to some repository for which GitHub Pages has been configured. Check this awesome actions list for more use cases.

Projects: awesome-actions, intro-to-vue, cssgridgenerator, array-explorer, ecommerce-netlify

> Why do I need a custom token? Because without it, the release completes, but doesn't trigger our post-release workflow.

This is so frustrating. Having to inject a PAT into the workflow just so it will kick off another workflow is not only annoying but it just feels wrong. Also not lots of operations are tied to my user which I don't like.

> It doesn't help that you can't really try any of this locally (I know of [act](https://github.com/nektos/act) but it only supports a small subset of the things you're trying to do in CI).

This is the biggest issue with GH Actions (and most CIs), testing your flows locally is hard if not impossible

All that said I think I prefer GH Actions over everything else I've used (Jenkins and GitLab), it just still has major shortcomings.

I highly recommend you use custom runners. The speed increase and cost savings are significant. I use WarpBuild [0] and have been very happy with them. I always look at alternatives when they are mentioned but I don't think I've found another service that provides macOS runners.

[0] https://www.warpbuild.com

GitHub does not offer a way to locally run a workflow. There are projects that try to fill this gap. One prominent example is act. However, I had it running on a Windows machine until it did not work anymore (probably a Docker update killed it) and I also had some issues on a Mac with Apple silicon. Again, probably due to Docker, but at the end it is cumbersome for the user, no matter what the root cause is.

Not sure if I am missing something but you can definitely run (some?) GH actions locally with act: https://github.com/nektos/act

Seen a couple posts on here say otherwise.

Services: Support for services like databases is not yet available. (Issue #173)

At the beginning of writing this post, I planned to use a cool tool to run Github actions locally https://github.com/nektos/act and I was able to successfully launch the construction and launch of the entire project locally through it, but for this I had to allocate a larger amount of memory and processor, as a result of https://github.com/nektos/act I had to give up and write a small Bash script to build images.

To speed up your development cycle, install and use the act tool to test-run your action directly in your development environment. This tool lets you invoke a GitHub workflow right on your local machine and will save you the round-trips of pushing each change to GitHub to see if it works.

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.