We're always welcome to feedback, and we're continuing to invest and improve on the product, so I'm hopeful that we can address the features that you're missing.
* Setting up GHA is still a lot of "commit and hope for the best". I've resorted to having a sandbox repo just for experimentation/testing so that I don't overly pollute repos that I actually care about. It would be great to get more instrumentation to see what is going on.
* I have a monorepo for Dockerfiles. It's quite annoying that I have to have separate invocations for different Dockerfiles in dependabot.yml. I should be able to specify /Dockerfile or /Dockerfile* as patterns for detection. The Dependabot invocation for GitHub Actions is a single entry and it would be great to have that.
* I quite like Step Security's Harden Runner but it does require more work/invocations to get this set up. Maybe GH can work with them to more closely incorporate said functionality?
* Make the cache bigger? I build a fair number of multi-arch containers and starting all of them at once tends to blow out the cache.
* Given the interest around sigstore and SBOMs, maybe incorporate native capabilities to sign artifacts and generate SBOMS?
There is act[0] which aims to let you run github actions locally via Docker. It isn't perfect but it does a decent job at it, and for the most part your pipeline can be run locally.
After MS bought GH, I had hopes that they would build a tool to run action locally, but nothing yet.
I like the idea and also would like something first-party, but I imagine it's hard and GitHub would want it to be less buggy than act is, and maybe they're trying but it's not there.
Tbh even if it ran remotely in actual Actions, but just didn't show up in the repo UI, logged locally, that would be fine?
As for the cache, we doubled it at the end of last year to 10GB. https://github.blog/changelog/2021-11-23-github-actions-cach..., but I can see how multi-arch images would be very large. Have you considered putting images into GitHub Container Registry instead of putting the layers into the cache? I'd love to understand if that is appropriate for your workflow, and if not, what the limitation there is.
Appreciate the rest of the feedback, I'll pass it along to the appropriate teams.
i'm not sure how well that can be represented in GH actions, but that would surely be the better option?
you'll always risk some kind of race condition there, e.g. atlantis locks the project while something is planned but not applied to avoid such things from happening. this of course prevents having multiple PRs "ready" at the same time, you'd have to unlock the active PR lock to be able to implement another one.
I know I can create user/organisation templates, but all that does is put it in the UI chooser to create a commit to put it in the repo from the web. I want to do something like `include: OJFord/workflows/terraform-provider.yml` or `include: OJFord/workflows/rust.yml`
Perhaps even better would be I don't even have to specify that in the repo, they just apply automatically to any which match a given pattern - named `terraform-provider-*` or having a file `Cargo.toml` say - but I realise that's probably too big a deviation from the way Actions works at this point.
(E.g. if you git submodule foreach git checkout master, your diff if you have one will be updating commit hashes, not -whatever +master. This is good for a lot of other reasons but doesn't help here.)