[andrewaylett]

Hear, hear.

Although I'd slightly rephrase that to "if you don't change anything, you should end up running pretty much the same code locally as in CI".

GitHub Actions is really annoying for this, as it has no supported local mode. Act is amazing, but insufficient: the default runner images are huge, so you can't use the same environment, and it's not supported.

Pre-commit on the other hand is fantastic for this kind of issue, as you can run it locally and it'll fairly trivially run the same checks in CI as it does locally. You want it to be fast, though, and in practice I normally wind up having pre-commit run only cacheable tests locally and exclude any build and test hooks from CI because I'll run them as separate CI jobs.

I did release my own GHA action for pre-commit (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/cached-pre-commit), because the official one doesn't cache very heavily and the author prefers folk to use his competing service.

[cedws]

I have to disagree about Act, my experience is that it only works for extremely simple workflows, and even then it’s easy to run into differences between Act and GitHub Actions. I’ve raised many bugs but AFAIK there’s like one guy working on it in his own time.

It’s terrible that the community has had to invent something like this when it should be provided by GitHub. I suspect the GitHub Actions team is a skeleton crew because nothing ever seems to get done over there.

[andrewaylett]

I think we're in agreement, generally -- and GitHub have no incentive to help, because Actions are a moat and if it's too easy to run outside their environment then it's too easy to move away from their environment.

It's no shade on the author of Act (or on the quality of the code they've written) that they can't keep up with GitHub.

[mdaniel]

> AFAIK there’s like one guy working on it in his own time

That may very well be true of nektos/act itself, but it now has at least two (depending on how one counts such things) ongoing forks over in the Gitea and Forgejo projects as they foolishly try to squat on it instead of using a real CI tool