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by dwightgunning 1300 days ago
Can you elaborate with some examples of workflows that it is incapable of?

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.

1 comments

Workflows that interact with the Github API heavily will fail as they're not available in act e.g. actions like https://github.com/styfle/cancel-workflow-action. Dealing with secrets is also a bit cumbersome. You can throw the following on actions that are not compatible with act in order to skip them:

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.

That’s a great example and suggestion. Thank you!