ocurrent VS action-tmate

Y axis is tool selection. Positive region of axis is “use a DSL”, lower region is “use a GeneralPurposeProgrammingLanguage”

The line starts at the origin, has a SMALL positive bump, than plummets downwards near vertically.

Gets it right? Tools like ocurrent (contrasted against GH actions) [1], cdk (contrasted against TF yaml) [2]

Gets it wrong? Well, see parent post. This made me so crazy at work (where seemingly everyone has been drinking the yaml dsl koolaide) that i built a local product simulator and yaml generator for their systems because “coding” against the product was so untenable.

[1] https://github.com/ocurrent/ocurrent/blob/master/doc/example...

Keep working on this. It’s a splendid idea. Would be cool to eventually have a recipe where you import the crate, then program the deploy in rust, invoking your tool which builds my-build.rs, or a proper cargo build.

The following not true apples to apples, but pretty close. Rather than another crummy stringy DSL, the ocaml community said “we want to program our CI pipelines in OCaml”. So, they created https://github.com/ocurrent/ocurrent. You build your pipeline in an incredible language—then the CI server simply invokes your pipeline code, assuming you’ve implemented a basic interface.

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...