How to run GitHub Actions workflows locally?

59
votes

I am planning to move our Travis CI build to GitHub Actions using Docker for our per-commit testing.

Can I reproducibly run these new GitHub Actions workflows locally? Is there a generic way to run any GitHub Actions workflow locally?

5
github-actions
There is if you are still using the deprecated HCL syntax for actions and haven't graduated to the new YAML style. I have yet to see anything being done to support the new yaml style workflows - smac89
there is a lot of interest for nejtos/act to support YAML syntax, see my answer below with links to the issues it's being discussed. - Jubair
maybe self-hosted runners can help github.com/actions/runner - UselesssCat

5 Answers

64
votes

There are tools like the already-mentioned act, but they are not perfect. You are not alone with this issue. Similar problems are:

  • how to test Jenkins builds locally
  • how to test GitLab CI builds locally
  • how to test Circle CI builds locally
  • how to test XXXX builds locally

And my solution for these problems is:

  • avoid functionalities provided by your CI tools (GitHub Actions, Gitlab CI, etc)
  • write as much as possible in CI-agnostic way (BASH scripts, PowerShell scripts, Gradle scripts, NPM scripts, Dockerfiles, Ansible scripts - anything you know)
  • invoke those scripts from your CI tool. In GitHub actions: run: your command to run
17
votes

You can use nektos/act which supports yaml syntax since 0.2.0 (prerelease).

Check out their latest release.

10
votes

your best bet is https://github.com/nektos/act however (prior to 0.2.0) it doesn't support yaml syntax yet, though there is a lot of interest aka: https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/80 https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/76 and https://github.com/nektos/act/issues/74

Gitlab has gitlab-runner exec docker job-name but that's Gitlab :)

5
votes

One way to test Github actions is to create a private repo, and iterate the actions conf there. So you can avoid polluting the actual repo with broken commits.

I know, this is not a direct answer to the question - this is not a local way. But this didn’t occur to me at first and I think this could be enough for many use cases.

0
votes

with the use of docker containers, this tool called act, can be found here, https://github.com/nektos/act You can run all your github actions locally inside a docker container. NB: act builds all necessary containers for actions to run. all you do is follow the documentation on how to use the tool