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Comment by thrown-0825 | Hacker News Reader

until you have to debug a GH action, especially if it only runs on main or is one of the handful of tasks that are only picked up when committed to main.

god help you, and don’t even bother with the local emulators / mocks.

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Sourcehut builds is so much better. You can actually ssh into the machine and debug it directly.

There is a community action for doing so in Github too, but god knows if it's secure or works as well as Sourcehut.

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-ssh

But debugging Jenkins jobs is absolute pain too, in varying ways depending on how the job was defined (clicking through the ui, henerated by something, groovy, pipelines, etc).

Yea, thats really a pain and could be improved.

Are there any Jenkins Gurus out there who can give some tips?

I've had a great experience using `act` to debug github actions containers. I guess your mileage, as usual, will vary depending on what you are doing in CI.

i tried act a couple years ago and ran into a lot of issues when running actions that have external dependencies

What are the good local emulators for gh actions? The #1 reason we don’t use them is because the development loop is appallingly slow.

none of them are good ime, stopped using actions for the same reason

nektos/act was considered good enough to be adopted as the CI solution for Gitea and Forgejo. The latter uses it for all their development, seems to work out fine for them.

I've never been a fan of GitHub Actions (too locked-in/proprietary for my taste), so no idea if it lives up to expectations.

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