Action-Debugger by WarpBuild

This GitHub Action offers you a direct way to interact with the host system on which the actual scripts (Actions) will run.

Features

• Debug your GitHub Actions by using SSH or Web shell
• Continue your Workflows afterwards

Supported Operating Systems

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

Getting Started

By using this minimal example an interactive ssh session will be created.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup ssh session
        uses: Warpbuilds/action-debugger@v1.3

To get the connection string, just open the Checks tab in your Pull Request or Run and scroll to the bottom. There you can connect either directly per SSH or via a web based terminal. The connection string is also logged inside workflow logs.

Manually triggered debug

Instead of having to add/remove, or uncomment the required config and push commits each time you want to run your workflow with debug, you can make the debug step conditional on an optional parameter that you provide through a workflow_dispatch "manual event".

Add the following to the on events of your workflow:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      debug_enabled:
        type: boolean
        required: false
        default: false

Then add an if condition to the debug step:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Enable ssh debugging of manually-triggered workflows if the input option was provided
      - name: Setup interactive ssh session
        uses: Warpbuilds/action-debugger@v1.3
        if: ${{ github.event_name == 'workflow_dispatch' && inputs.debug_enabled }}

You can then manually run a workflow on the desired branch and set debug_enabled to true to get a debug session.

Detached mode

By default, this Action starts a ssh session and waits for the session to be done (typically by way of a user connecting and exiting the shell after debugging). In detached mode, this Action will start the ssh session, print the connection details, and continue with the next step(s) of the workflow's job. At the end of the job, the Action will wait for the session to exit.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup interactive ssh session
        uses: Warpbuilds/action-debugger@v1.3
        with:
          detached: true

By default, this mode will wait at the end of the job for a user to connect and then to terminate the ssh session. If no user has connected within 10 minutes after the post-job step started, it will terminate the ssh session and quit gracefully.

Timeout

By default the ssh session will remain open until the workflow times out. You can specify your own timeout in minutes if you wish to reduce GitHub Actions usage.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup interactive ssh session
        uses: Warpbuilds/action-debugger@v1.3
        timeout-minutes: 15

Only on failure

By default a failed step will cause all following steps to be skipped. You can specify that the ssh session only starts if a previous step failed.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup interactive ssh session
        if: ${{ failure() }}
        uses: Warpbuilds/action-debugger@v1.3

Use registered public SSH key(s)

If you have registered one or more public SSH keys with your GitHub profile, ssh will be started such that only those keys are authorized to connect, otherwise anybody can connect to the ssh session. If you want to require a public SSH key to be installed with the ssh session, no matter whether the user who started the workflow has registered any in their GitHub profile, you will need to configure the setting limit-access-to-actor to true, like so:

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup interactive ssh session
        uses: Warpbuilds/action-debugger@v1.3
        with:
          limit-access-to-actor: true

If the registered public SSH key is not your default private SSH key, you will need to specify the path manually, like so: ssh -i <path-to-key> <ssh-connection-string>.

Continue a workflow

If you want to continue a workflow and you are inside an ssh session, just create a empty file with the name continue either in the root directory or in the project directory by running touch continue or sudo touch /continue.

Attribution

This action is built on top of the great work done by tmate