Built a step-debugger for workflows on top of act

[ruzmuh]

Hi all

I used act a while back to run my workflows locally, and recently came back to it for a project which led me to build a small thing on top of it that I wanted to share here.

act runs a workflow start to finish. What I kept wanting was to stop before a step runs, look at the env the next step will see, get a shell in the job container as it is mid-run, and re-run a step after tweaking it - instead of edit-push-wait-on-CI.

So I made actl - a TUI step-debugger for workflows, with act as the engine underneath (I didn't want to reimplement the Actions engine, so uses: - docker / composite / node - all runs through act's real one).

One honest caveat: act's per-step machinery is unexported, so to hook a pause between steps I'm running a tiny soft-fork of act (a submodule + a replace in go.mod). I'd rather not maintain a fork long-term, but that's where it is today.

• Pause before/after any step - breakpoints, run-to-cursor, or single-step.
• Drop into the live job container mid-run.
• Inspect the job-scoped env at any pause.
• Edit a step's command/env and re-run it in place.

Repo + a GIF demo: https://github.com/ruzmuh/actl (MIT, like act).

Mostly posting to see whether this is useful to anyone else who debugs workflows locally, or just to me.

Either way - thanks for act.