gitlab-ci-local VS action-tmate

Among these options, the one that has gained the most traction is gitlab-ci-local :

The main reason behind this change is to have consistent scripts for local testing and remote runners during testing and debugging. However, there are already tools available, such as gitlab-ci-local, that allow you to run jobs locally, partially invalidating this argument. Additionally, working locally may not provide access to all necessary variables.

Two tools I've used for local Gitlab CI runs: - https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local - https://gitlab.com/AdrianDC/gitlabci-local

What you might want to look at is this, to meet both needs https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local exists but its not quite there yet. Personally Ive resorted to setting up a self-managed instance at home, relying on the included linter/validator and pushing repeatedly as before.

If you already have/had a working pipeline then maybe https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local has something worth looking at.

> One thing that would be nice, however, would be the ability to run the entire pipeline locally.

This cost me many hours of waiting for the Gitlab CI runner when debugging non-trivial pipelines, when the issue was something that did not have to do with the script steps inside of the jobs but rather how the Gitlab runner handled things.

I've found gitlab-ci-local [1] which actually does run the Gitlab pipeline locally, although I had to write some boilerplaye scripts to set up all the necessary 'CI_FOO_SOMETHING' environment variables before running the tool. (Which sometimes came back to bite me because the issue was actually in the content of some of those environment variables). It's still a very good tool.

[1] https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

Most CI/CD tools let you run pipelines locally. Just one example: https://circleci.com/blog/using-runner-for-local-testing/ . In my opinion Gitlab and Circleci have the test tools for this.

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...