collaborate with nektos/act for github action running

[georgettica]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

once we have github action files and we want to test them locally, we have no way to do it.

a solution that exists is https://github.com/nektos/act
maybe we should collaborate so it will land in some form in this official github repo

Proposed solution

this will shroten the cycle of coding github actions and make coding github actions easier

Additional context

NaN

[vilmibm]

Running actions locally is something we've discussed at length; we agreed that depending on docker would be ultimately too brittle and confusing. however, it looks like act is pretty cool and worth our investigation. I'd like to understand its design, advantages, and shortcomings as adopting it would be a very significant undertaking from a policy / code organization perspective.

[georgettica]

I totally agree with you on that and understand that relying on docker can be unreliable.

So far I felt there were areas in which it can improve (I am not a maintainer there) but it's a cool tool that maybe could inspire you to something similar

[georgettica]

@cplee @catthehacker

As people who are working on nektos/act act you comment aswell?

[catthehacker]

Currently it's far from perfect and many things are still incompatible comparing to GitHub Actions, I'd rather not recommend of implementing it in gh because of that and because I want to propose (quite a lot of) breaking changes in future but a "pingback" in README or something similar should be just fine so people can discover it 😸.

bonus thing 👀:
@jonico is going to present act on https://resources.github.com/webcasts/Summerfest-2021-South-Europe/

[cplee]

The biggest challenge with act has been emulating the Actions runners inside containers. This presents a challenge given the size and complexity of tooling available on each runner. Additionally, supporting other platforms (e.g. Windows and MacOS) are non-trivial.

My suggestion would be to leverage the existing GH actions runners if possible. It would be awesome if i could do gh run and it would send up my current working directory up to a runner and then run the given job and pipe the output back to my local workstation. This would address the root problem of commit/push/pray loop that we have with actions. This would also offer perfect replication of the GH actions environment (since it'd run on a real runner).

[ChristopherHX]

My suggestion would be to leverage the existing GH actions runners if possible. It would be awesome if i could do gh run and it would send up my current working directory up to a runner and then run the given job and pipe the output back to my local workstation.

I implemented something like this in Runner.Client/gharun, replace gh run with the dotnet tool gharun and it start the official actions/runner with small modifications (to allow windows container, linux container on windows and macOS, removal of preprocessor directives like OS_WINDOWS).
The new full composite actions coming soon will just work by merging the changes of actions/runner

[georgettica]

Nice!
I will take a look at this soon

[kichik]

GitHub CLI has an extension API now. So I forked and released act as a ghcli extension.

$ gh ext install kichik/gh-act
$ gh act 
[CDK Deploy/Python package] 🚀  Start image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest
[CDK Deploy/Node.js CI    ] 🚀  Start image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest
[CDK Deploy/Python package]   🐳  docker pull image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest platform= username= forcePull=false
...

[cplee]

Thanks @kichik - great idea!

I've created a new repo nektos/gh-act that automatically releases a new GitHub CLI extension for act anytime a release of act is performed to keep them in sync. I've also updated the README.md with instructions for installing the extension.