Local GitHub Actions with nektos/act, Now with a Visual Interface

[fean-developer]

Hey everyone! 👋
Well, I start with saying , nektos/act is a very amazing tool and recently helped me a lot

As I started working more deeply with GitHub Actions, one challenge quickly stood out: the feedback loop.
Even small changes to a workflow often required committing, pushing, and waiting for a CI run just to validate a simple adjustment.

That’s when I discovered nektos/act — and honestly, it’s a tool that truly deserves recognition. The ability to run GitHub Actions workflows locally, while maintaining compatibility with how they execute on GitHub, fundamentally changes the developer experience. It enables faster iteration, immediate validation, and a much higher level of confidence before pushing changes.

With act, workflows stop being something you only validate remotely and become part of your local development loop, bringing CI/CD closer to everyday coding practices.

That positive experience is exactly what sparked a new idea.

While act is powerful, its interaction model is still primarily CLI-based. That’s when I saw an opportunity: what if we could bring a visual layer to this experience — something intuitive, real-time, and easier to understand?

This is how the extension was born: to bring the power of nektos/act into VS Code, enhanced with a visual representation of workflows — inspired by tools like n8n — making it easier to follow execution flow, debug steps, and understand pipeline behavior.
In the end, the extension doesn’t replace act — it builds on top of it. It’s a way to extend and enhance an already excellent tool, making it more accessible, visual, and integrated into the daily developer workflow.

🔗 Check it out here:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fean-developer.act-visual-runner

I’d really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or contributions! 🙌
If anyone is interested in trying it out and sharing their experience, it would help a lot to improve the tool.