Run GitHub Actions locally

A common pain point with GitHub Actions is that the feedback loop is so long: make a change, push, wait for it to run, find an error, try to debug, repeat. Which is why I was so happy to discover act, a tool for running GitHub Actions locally! The only prerequisite is Docker, which act uses to pull the appropriate images to run your actions.

By default, act will run the action for the push event, although you can configure it to run specific events or jobs:

# run the `push` event:
act

# run a specific event:
act pull_request

# run a specific job:
act -j test

If your action needs a GitHub token (for example, if you’re checking out your code with actions/checkout) you can supply it with the -s flag (for “secrets”) and the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable. This is easiest if you have the GitHub CLI installed:

act -s GITHUB_TOKEN="$(gh auth token)"

Note that the official docs note that supplying your token in this way can leak it to the shell history.