cancel-workflow-action VS action-tmate

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.

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...