batect VS cancel-workflow-action

https://batect.dev/ this is like Act but agnostic and public

If you're dockerizing a dev environment check out batect, it's kind of like the combo of docker-compose + make (i.e. simple script running) that is really the tool we all just want: https://batect.dev/ It can easily define one-off container tasks like integration test runs with just a couple lines of config.

Earlier this year at $DAYJOB I was on a project to uplift the deployment pipelines and DevOps capabilities within the team. Today we have full Continuous Deployment, Trunk Based Development, and SlackOps. I've written a couple of articles below on the approach we took which was around heavy use of Docker and the tool Batect.

Go the next step and run a local kubernetes cluster with kind or k3s (it will take you 30 seconds to have a k8s cluster going). IMHO the kubectl CLI is a lot more logical than docker's CLI. You can create all your local storage volumes ahead of time, create a pod that attaches to it, and then just kubectl exec into the pod vs. writing a long fiddly docker command line string (or crafting a docker-compose.yml). It's easy to adjust the pod as necessary while it runs too, like adding a service to expose ports without rerunning the container.

But if you do like the idea of docker dev environemnts, check out a tool like batect: https://github.com/batect/batect It's somewhat like if docker-compose had make-like commands you could define. Your whole dev environment and workflow can be defined in a simple yaml config that anyone can use.

Workflows that interact with the Github API heavily will fail as they're not available in act e.g. actions like https://github.com/styfle/cancel-workflow-action. Dealing with secrets is also a bit cumbersome. You can throw the following on actions that are not compatible with act in order to skip them:

if: ${{ !env.ACT }}

That said, despite it's limitations, I've been using both act and tmate in combination for a couple of years. Gets the job done.

For Github Actions, can highly recommend https://github.com/styfle/cancel-workflow-action which we use to cancel exists runs on same branch when never commits (push or force-push) arrives.