Run your GitHub Actions locally

Just this week I tried giving this another chance to debug some weird CI failures for ruby tests. I’m on M-series macs so there is an inherent platform mismatch. That coupled with us using depot images as action runners. I was never able to get it running past the dry-run stage. There is just a lot of differences between CI runners and my local docker images. I even gave the image from catthehacker a try. Which is like >15GB. It still wouldn’t run. Finally gave up.

In my experience (and as reflected by the comments on this post already), trying to run complex CI workflow locally is a fairly hopeless enterprise. If you have a fully containerized workflow, you might be able to get close, but even then ensuring you have all of your CI specific environment variables is often not a trivial task, and if your workflow orchestrates things across tasks (e.g. one task uploads an artifact and another task uses that artifact) you'll have a hard time reproducing exactly what is happening in CI. My company (RWX) builds a GitHub Actions competitor and we intentionally do not support local execution -- instead we focused on making it easy to kick off remote builds from your local machine without having to do a `git push` and we made it easy to grab an SSH session before, during, or after a running task to inspect things in the exact build environment that your workflow is running.

I've wanted this so much! My main questions are about permissions. I use environment-specific variables and secrets, I would need to reconfigure them locally and didn't see how. The other issue is workload identity federation.

Lots of changes have to be made to your github action workflow to actually make this work properly.

It's amazing that Microsoft built a whole IDE and programming environment for builds but left all the debugging tools up to the community.