github-workflows-kt
act
github-workflows-kt | act | |
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8 | 146 | |
486 | 50,744 | |
1.6% | 2.6% | |
9.7 | 9.2 | |
7 days ago | 9 days ago | |
Kotlin | Go | |
Apache License 2.0 | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
github-workflows-kt
- GitHub Actions could be so much better
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XML is better than YAML
We use Kotlin to generate the yaml for our github actions: https://github.com/typesafegithub/github-workflows-kt
Nothing like a good old type safe compiled language to cut down on the verbosity, copy paste usage, silly syntax errors, weird undocumented you just have to know the magical incantations, etc. Kotlin or similar languages are the way to go. Much safer, more compact, easier to cut down on the copy paste reuse (which is just miserable drudgery), easy to introduce some sane abstractions where that makes sense. You get auto completion. And if it compiles, it's likely to just work.
People keep on moving around the deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic when it comes to configuration languages. Substituting yaml for json or toml just moves the problems. And substituting those with XML just introduces other issues and only marginally improves things. Well formed xml is nice. But so is well formed json. Schemas help, if the urls don't 404 and you have tools that can actually do something with them. Which, as it turns out is mostly not a thing in practice. And without that, it's just repetitive bloat. XML with schemas becomes very hard to read quickly.
There's a reason, people started ignoring XML once json became popular: json does most of the essential stuff well enough that XML just isn't worth the effort. And if you have something where you'd actually need the complexity of XML, it's likely to be some really ugly bloated kind of thing where the last thing you'd want to do is edit it manually.
I've dealt with cloudformation in XML form at some point in my life. It sucks. Not just a little bit. It's an absolute piss poor format for a thing like that. Since such a thing was lacking at the time, we ended up actually building our own little tools to generate that xml. Hand editing it was just too painful. One mistake could corrupt your entire stack. And it takes ages to find out if you actually got it right. In Json form it's hardly any better. It's just one of those convoluted over-engineered things. Anyway, Json support for cloudformation was not there at the time and the difference is like asking whether you'd preferred to be shot or stabbed. It's going to suck either way.
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Typesafe Github Workflows explained to a 5 years old
github-workflows-kt is a tool for creating GitHub Actions workflows in a type-safe script, helping you to build robust workflows for your GitHub projects without mistakes, with pleasure, in Kotlin.
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Guides for Kotlin scripting use case
The github-workflows-kt project uses Kotlin scripting, and it recommends doing everything using main.kts, because it's easier.
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Feature Flags in a CI Pipeline
I use matrix tests with github actions to test my kt-search client with different versions of elastisearch and opensearch. Pretty easy to set up: https://github.com/jillesvangurp/kt-search/blob/master/.gith...
Basically it fires up elasticsearch using docker-compose and then the integration tests run against that. You could use a similar strategy to test different feature flag combinations.
For some of our private projects, we use kts to generate the github action yaml files using this: https://github.com/krzema12/github-workflows-kt
Well worth checking out if you have more complex workflows. Yaml is just horrible in terms of copy paste reuse. Also nice to get some compile time safety and auto complete with our action files.
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Kts Scripting of Yaml & Json Dialects
One of my team members, Nikky, got annoyed with the verbosity and insane amount of copy-paste reuse needed to drive Github Actions. And true to her nature, promptly fixed it by using and contributing to GitHub Actions Kotlin DSL
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GitHub Actions: a New Hope in YAML Wasteland
GitHub: https://github.com/krzema12/github-actions-kotlin-dsl
- GitHub Actions Kotlin DSL
act
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Create a Custom GitHub Action in Rust
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.
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How to debug GitHub actions. Real-world example
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.
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Using my new Raspberry Pi to run an existing GitHub Action
Link: https://github.com/nektos/act
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Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners. Reduces GitHub Actions bill 10x
Could you upload your build of GitHub's runner image to Docker Hub?
This would be quite useful for users of other GitHub Actions clones like act [0].
[0]: https://github.com/nektos/act
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Git commit messages are useless
> These kinds of commit messages are typically an indicator of a broken process where somebody needs to commit to see something happen, like a deployment or build process, and aren't able to assert that stuff works locally.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves with services like github actions. Something running locally like "act" [1] isn't sufficient because it doesn't have everything github has and is extra friction anyway to get everyone to use it for testing.
[1] https://github.com/nektos/act
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Essential Command Line Tools for Developers
View on GitHub
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What’s with DevOps engineers using `make` of all things?
If you use Github actions, act is incredibly useful. It can be used to test your GH actions, but also serves as an interface for running tasks locally.
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Streamlining CI/CD Pipelines with Code: A Developer's Guide
That's something that often is difficult or basically impossible. Except for maybe GitHub actions through Act (https://github.com/nektos/act). I'd still lean to something in the yaml sphere if it eventually would be used in deployment pipelines and such. For example a solution incorporating ansible.
It also seems to me that the argument you make is mostly focused on the building step? Earthly certainly seems focused on that aspect.
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GitHub Actions Are a Problem
I feel I'm being trolled, but I'll bite and accept the resulting downvotes
I don't think treating every mention of act as an opportunity for airing of personal grievances is helpful in a discussion when there's already ample reports of people's concrete issues with it, had one looked at the 800 issues in its repo https://github.com/nektos/act/issues?q=is%3Aissue or the 239 from gitea's for https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner/issues or whatever is going on with Forgejo's fork https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/act .
But, as for me specifically, there are two and a half answers: I wanted to run VSCodium's build locally, which act for sure puked about. Then, while trying to troubleshoot that, I thought I'd try something simpler and have it run the lint job from act's own repo <https://github.com/nektos/act/blob/1252e551b8672b1e16dc8835d...> to rule out "you're holding it wrong" type junk. It died with
[checks/lint] Failure - Main actions/setup-go@v3
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How Steve Jobs Saved Apple with the Online Apple Store
https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 :
> GitHub Actions currently charges $0.16 per minute* for the macOS M1 Runners. That comes out to $84,096 for 1 machine year*
GitHub Runner is written in Go; it fetches tasks from GitHub Actions and posts the results back to the Pull Request that spawned the build.
nektos/act is how Gitea Actions builds GitHub Actions workflow YAML build definition documents. https://github.com/nektos/act
https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/17200423527675700... :
> This is the macOS Ventura installer running in 30 VMs, in 30 #nix derivations at once. It gets the installer from Apple, automates the installation using Tesseract OCR and TCL Expect scripts. This is to test the repeatability. A single function call `makeDarwinImage`.
With a Multi-Stage Dockerfile/Containerfild, you can have a dev environment like xcode or gcc+make in the first stage that builds the package, and then the second stage the package is installed and tested, and then the package is signed and published to a package repo / app store / OCI container image repository.
SLSA now specifies builders for signing things correctly in CI builds with keys in RAM on the build workers.
"Build your own SLSA 3+ provenance builder on GitHub Actions" https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-builder-github
What are some alternatives?
kohttp - Kotlin DSL http client
reverse-rdp-windows-github-actions - Reverse Remote Desktop into Windows on GitHub Actions for Debugging and/or Job Introspection [GET https://api.github.com/repos/nelsonjchen/reverse-rdp-windows-github-actions: 403 - Repository access blocked]
setup-wsl - A GitHub action to install and setup a Linux distribution for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
cache - Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions
maven-simple - Example Maven project demonstrating the use of
dagger - Application Delivery as Code that Runs Anywhere
nix-configs - My Nix{OS} configuration files
earthly - Super simple build framework with fast, repeatable builds and an instantly familiar syntax – like Dockerfile and Makefile had a baby.
kotlinpoet - A Kotlin API for generating .kt source files.
action-tmate - Debug your GitHub Actions via SSH by using tmate to get access to the runner system itself.
github-actions-typing - Bring type-safety to your GitHub actions' API!
LSPatch - LSPatch: A non-root Xposed framework extending from LSPosed