LITERAT

Fullstack Developer & Whitewater Kayaker & Scout

How to run GitHub Actions locally?

GitHub Actions is another CI pipeline that has the same problem as others. It is hard to develop and test them locally before running them on a server. Here is a solution to how to do that.

24. 3. 2024development Edit on GitHub

Every developer is used to test his/her code before deploying it to production. But when comes it to testing the CI pipelines there is every time the problem of how to test it before deploying to the CI server. Will my pipeline work? What does this command and how does it affect the others? Most of the time developers just commit the modification of the pipeline, push it and watch to the server how does it works or when it fails.

For the GitHub Actions, there is a way how to do this.

Use Act

To solve this issue you can use act CLI tool to test and develop GitHub Actions locally. It is based on Docker. You can install it in various ways on different platforms.

Just install it and run act. The output will look like this:

$ test-github-actions git:(main) ✗ act
? Please choose the default image you want to use with act:
  - Large size image: ca. 17GB download + 53.1GB storage, you will need 75GB of free disk space, snapshots of GitHub Hosted Runners without snap and pulled docker images
  - Medium size image: ~500MB, includes only necessary tools to bootstrap actions and aims to be compatible with most actions
  - Micro size image: <200MB, contains only NodeJS required to bootstrap actions, doesn't work with all actions

Default image and other options can be changed manually in ~/.actrc (please refer to https://github.com/nektos/act#configuration for additional information about file structure) Micro
[Build Ghost and test theme/install] 🚀  Start image=node:16-buster-slim
INFO[0023] Parallel tasks (0) below minimum, setting to 1
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   🐳  docker pull image=node:16-buster-slim platform= username= forcePull=true
INFO[0031] Parallel tasks (0) below minimum, setting to 1
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   🐳  docker create image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] network="host"
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   🐳  docker run image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] network="host"
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   ☁  git clone 'https://github.com/vimtor/action-zip' # ref=v1.2
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   ☁  git clone 'https://github.com/softprops/action-gh-release' # ref=v0.1.15
[Build Ghost and test theme/install] ⭐ Run Main actions/checkout@v4
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   🐳  docker cp src=/home/officialrajdeepsingh/medium/test-github-actions/. dst=/home/officialrajdeepsingh/medium/test-github-actions
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   ✅  Success - Main actions/checkout@v4
[Build Ghost and test theme/install] ⭐ Run Main Easy Zip Files
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   🐳  docker cp src=/home/officialrajdeepsingh/.cache/act/vimtor-action-zip@v1.2/ dst=/var/run/act/actions/vimtor-action-zip@v1.2/
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   🐳  docker exec cmd=[node /var/run/act/actions/vimtor-action-zip@v1.2/dist/index.js] user= workdir=
| Ready to zip "build/ home.txt" into example.zip
|   - build/
|   - home.txt
|
| Zipped file example.zip successfully
[Build Ghost and test theme/install]   ✅  Success - Main Easy Zip Files
[Build Ghost and test theme/install] Cleaning up container for job install
[Build Ghost and test theme/install] 🏁  Job succeeded

For more information about how you can use it, configure it or what other functionality it can provide, read the article about how to run GitHub Actions locally using the act CLI tool. Or just look at the act repository.

LITERAT

Use Act

References