Launch a Debugging Terminal into GitHub Actions(blog.gripdev.xyz)
78 pointsby martinpeck4 hours ago9 comments
  • embedding-shapean hour ago
    That the entire ecosystem seems to have moved to GitHub Actions is such a loss for productivity. I remember when CircleCI first launched, and you could "Rebuild with SSH" which gave you a bash command to connect to the running instance whenever you wanted, was such a no-brainer, and I'm sure why many of us ended up using CircleCI for years. Eventually CircleCI became too expensive, but I still thought that if other services learnt anything from CircleCI, it would be this single feature, because of the amount of hours it saved thousands of developers.

    Lo and behold, when GitHub Actions first launched, that feature was nowhere to be seen, and I knew from that moment on that betting on GitHub Actions would be a mistake, if they didn't launch with such a table-stakes feature. Seems still Microsoft didn't get their thumb out, and wasting countless developer's time with this, sad state of affairs.

    Thank you pbiggar for the time we got with CircleCI :) Here's to hoping we'll have CircleCI.V2 appearing at some point in the future, I just know it involves DAGs and "Rebuild with SSH" somehow :)

    • kevmo31419 minutes ago
      I am surprised Docker didn't launch into the CI market. Running a container build as CI seems like it would both be a boon for simplifying CI caching and also debugging since it's ~reproducible locally.
  • stabblesan hour ago
    I'm using tmate for this: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate
    • Etherytean hour ago
      This is the only reasonable way to ever do this, requires no effort, just copy paste one of the examples and you're done. My only gripe is that the most secure option isn't the first example in the repo. Limit access to the actor and put it behind the debug only flag and you're good to go. Still, I remove it after the fact once I don't need it anymore since it feels a bit too sketch with secrets available.
  • dreslan4 hours ago
    I love this use of hole punching, also love how the author handled authentication.

    I have definitely been in the position of needing to tweak a workflow over and over to get it to work, wasting hours when a terminal into the action would have allowed me to close the loop in minutes. Nice work to the author!

  • axm__21 minutes ago
    I was looking at frp for this. Setup is a bit more involved but you don't need a browser terminal: https://github.com/rgl/frp-github-actions-reverse-shell
  • whynotmaybe3 hours ago
    That's my hill to die on : you must have a self hosted agent.

    You can have many cloud agents as you wish but you must at least have one where you can remotely connect.

    It has saved me hours of troubleshooting and polluting "workflow v1.3.56_final_should_work_2" commits

    • maxloh18 minutes ago
      > That's my hill to die on : you must have a self hosted agent.

      That’s only true if you’re building simple workflows.

      A counter-example would be a workflow that builds and uploads Android APKs. When I last checked last year, there weren't any well-maintained Docker images with the Android SDK pre-installed, and there are no updated, publicly available builds for the runner-images: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/176

    • nwellinghoff2 hours ago
      Agreed. So much easier with self hosted runner. Just get out of your own way and do it. Use cases like caching etc also much more efficient on self hosted runner.
    • flanked-evergl35 minutes ago
      This kind of misses the point, though. I would say a much better rule is whatever runs in your workflows should also be entirely reproducible locally.

      Even if you can ssh into the remote environment that does not cover things like authentication and authorization, you don't just git a GITHUB_TOKEN with the same permissions.

  • baby_souffle2 hours ago
    There are many tools and techniques like this. Not a nock against this tool, just an observation that we seemingly need these tools.

    Is there no better way, GitHub?

    • embedding-shapean hour ago
      > Is there no better way, GitHub?

      CircleCI solved this anno 2011, with "Rebuild with SSH". Microsoft asleep at the wheel as usual, not sure it's unexpected at this point.

      • bathtub36520 minutes ago
        The more you have to rerun your actions to debug them, the more money Microsoft makes. They aren’t incentivized to save you time.
  • lawrencegripper4 hours ago
    Author here, this was something I wrote for fun/because I wanted to use it. Happy to answer any questions
    • Imustaskforhelp3 hours ago
      This is really awesome and I might try it (definitely bookmarked)

      This might seem (offtopic?) but you mention railway and how for a 20mb app the costs become almost negligible and I got curious because I usually refer hetzner to be one of the cheapest but still good/well worthy solution

      I find the pricing model of railway the most interesting. I am curious if you know of any other alternatives to railway which follow a similar pricing model as well as I'd like to compare if there are more of such cloud providers which provide this (preferably from a service which is more closer to bare metal than y'know cloud providers perhaps if that makes sense)

      • lawrencegripperan hour ago
        Thanks! I'm not aware of others offering this pricing model
  • franktankbankan hour ago
    When I see stuff like this, I think wow that is cool. But then I think about doing it myself and I get nervous about security ramifications. I don't know enough myself to know if author knows the right way ya know??
  • msie27 minutes ago
    I gave GH actions a chance when our org moved from Bamboo but I still hate it. I think i have to do more to get a build going.