c0b71d44-b9d4-48b7-8785-de4338ff8380

[giscus[bot]]

c0b71d44-b9d4-48b7-8785-de4338ff8380

Test GitHub Actions workflows locally with act to speed up feedback, reduce unnecessary hosted runner usage, and catch workflow issues earlier.

https://www.ssw.com.au/rules/test-github-actions-workflows-locally-with-act

[vladislav-kir]

Especially before the AI, debugging actions could sometimes to turn into an expensive nightmare, with every failed run taking you only slightly closer to solution. Testing with Act can save you those much needed tokens, so it is great suggestion!

[Aibono1225]

I had plenty of "works locally, fails on Actions" moment. Act makes reproducing and debugging those locally much easier

[jeoffreyfischer]

I had no idea you could run GitHub Actions locally. 😮 act looks like a really handy way to test workflows without having to push every little change to GitHub. Definitely adding this to my toolbox!

[harley-j]

I've had countles CI/CD pipelines fail through GitHub workflows, this will change the game for me. Definitely excited to see the time improvements using Act before having it blow up in a PR!

[ricksu978]

act can improve test iteration, but some features still need to be tested on GitHub itself, e.g. Azure login with federated credentials.

[kulesy]

Playwright tests can be flaky, testing locally can pass and production runs can then fail on the same tests. Figuring out how to make the tests less flaky are a pain that act unfortunately doesn’t solve sometimes.

[TobyChurches]

Writing and Debugging actions could be a really painful and slow experience - A tool like this will really help eliminate that bottleneck of testing and debugging - Leading to a MUCH faster feedback loop.

[RobJT-wq]

This seems like an awesome tool to add to my troubleshooting workflow for GitHub Actions

[suiyangqiu]

I wonder if Act is still the best tool to use here? Noticed that the creator of the video mentioned in the comments that they've been moving away from Act as it seems buggier than before and they have just been using GitHub CLI to execute the action on the branch 🤔

[0xharkirat]

I always test locally on act

[steven0x51]

it's great tool to test or experiment GitHub Actions on local

[username-must-be-unique]

This is great, I wished for a long time GH had some native dry run to test things out, this will do.

[Ben0189]

Great tools 👍🏻

I can see how useful this tool before AI, most of my GitHub Actions issues came from human mistakes like syntax errors, incorrect references, or logging/configuration problems. Since using AI to help write the Action, I haven’t really run into those issues anymore

[chrisschultzssw]

This is a great tool, but most of the Actions I maintain have other requirements (e.g. Azure login) so it doesn't work for me.

[bahjatalaadelssw]

Workflow tools and testing keeps production progress manageable.

[jerryluossw]

I think it is great, especially when I'm creating or modifying a pipeline. I no longer need to make a small change every time and wait a long time.

[ZenoWang1999]

I'll allow this Action to be triggered manually during the testing phase, in order to test whether there are any bugs in the Action itself

[thom-wang]

Not many stories because we use Azure Pipeline more often. And for now, we have AI to generate YAML - and it's fast and easy

[tino-liu]

I remember hearing a story from a friend their APP takes like 2-3 hours to build? That was in 2019 not sure how that is happening... but man, it would SUCK if during that 2 hour point and something fails. This Act sounds awesome hahah

[stephanfakossw]

Workflow and efficiency tools are great!

[babakamyljanovssw]

When we were adding infra code to create resources for internal project in Azure, I remember we committed every change to check if the resources are created successfully via Github Actions. This tool would have saved a lot of time to catch errors locally before committing changes.