How to run GitHub Actions workflows locally?

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William Entriken picture William Entriken · Dec 9, 2019 · Viewed 12.7k times · Source

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?

Answer

iirekm picture iirekm · Jan 30, 2020

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

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