Finally! I've been wanting something like this for ages- generally speaking I don't consider myself an idiot, but I'm forced to pull that into questioning every time I test and debug ci/cd actions with an endless stream of pull request modifications
You drop it in your workflow and get an SSH shell into the worker, figure things out iteratively, then push when it's working.
So far I’ve not found any limitations or issues using Ubuntu runners on my OSX dev machine. A couple examples from my workflows: - building docker images - provisioning VMs with the Digital Ocean cli / http api - hardening VMs with ansible - creating/managing k3s clusters with k3sup - deploying apps with helm
I like your suggested approach of using tmate to access the worker mid-way through a run. This should make it faster to develop/debug the steps that make up the workflow. Though this doesn’t address the cycle time of push-to-GitHub/queue-workflow/watch-for-result.
I’m actually going to try combining the two techniques - use tmate to develop inside a local act runner.
if: ${{ !env.ACT }}
That said, despite its limitations, I've been using both act and tmate in combination for a couple of years. Gets the job done.
(1) Who am I kidding, of course I am a cynic.
they are all at least semi proprietary.
Concourse, Circle CI and gitlab do that.
And running your jobs in Docker is what I recommend that people at my work do, and I admin several GitHub Enterprise Server instances and GitHub Enterprise Cloud as well.
This is the one thing that Drone got very right - every Drone job runs in a container. It is built in to the drone tooling to be able to run those jobs locally on your development machine as well, and requiring containers is why that works.
If you run your CI and/or CD steps from within a container, you can run that container anywhere, and writing a small script to read your CI/CD yaml (or whatever you use), and wrap your favorite container command line tool into a working local CI/CD system should be pretty trivial.
Using containers also makes moving to another CI/CD system which can use containers as trivial as it can currently be.