Setting Up GitHub Actions Locally and Quickly
In software development, a feedback loop that takes time and effort could be a major bottleneck. Especially if we have to run things on remote servers and figuring out what’s going on requires lots of effort, debugging could make frustrations. Today, I’m going to introduce a couple of tools that help to debug GitHub Actions workflows from local machines.
Act With act command, you can run workflows on your local machine. Once you run act command it reads YAML files under .github/workflows and runs the jobs in Docker containers immediately. We can make sure if there’s any major problem in the YAML without making commit and pushing to GitHub. Although act does not provide 100% compatible environment with GitHub Actions, it helps a lot when you start writing workflow settings. For example, it is useful to find any errors and mistakes in the YAML file structure, dependencies between jobs, calling actions, and steps written in shell scripts.
