GitHub Actions

“Great stuff, powerful as all heck, and once you see the power it was—for me—impossible NOT to think of 6 other uses”

“the added value of being able to access, build, and publish releases for Windows, macOS, and Linux on BOTH x64 and ARM cannot be overstated”

“There’s a great deal to be said for having (inter alia) matrices, job dependencies, and cross-platform runners already working and available.”

“delegating the expensive validation work to a separate environment — the beefier Actions runner, with run-isolation — and then watching the check status actually tightens the feedback loop”

“A nice thing that is not obvious on the main page is that the dataset and analysis are updated daily using Github Actions”

“Actions aren't secondary to most paid GH users; and if they are down it usually means no deployments and no tests, which can often halt work.”

“GitHub Actions being down this often is still less expensive than the cost of switching everything somewhere else”

“Every month something at GitHub (especially Actions) will go down to the point where you might as well have a prediction market over that.”

“You'd think they could at least separate out the GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners, so you're still able to dispatch jobs if the self-hosted runners are down.”

“There's at least 4 hour delays on my stuff, I can live with that since it's not really importat what time they run if it's within the day.”

“It is a PITA, but that can be significantly improved IMHO if you just write shell script wrappers for your tasks.”

“Most random errors in Github Actions (e.g. jobs just randomly failing or getting stuck and requiring a manual restart, or just being plain slow)”

“they're a pain to debug. A lot of the time, it feels like I'm tinkering with this huge script then holding my breath”

“then I learned how to use the GitHub Actions matrix feature and supporting multiple versions is suddenly easy”

“Even when you pin the full commit SHA for an action, that action may still pull in transitive dependencies (other actions) that aren't pinned.”

“the fact that a read-only workflow can poison GitHub Actions' cache such that other less-restricted workflows execute arbitrary code is an unexpected footgun”

“GitHub Action workflow runs weekly to pull in the latest OS images, update and roll over a smoke test VM, monitor, roll over the rest or rollback and ping me in Slack.”

“if we were ever going to move off of GitHub Actions, it wouldn't be to a service that required use to manage our own VMs/images”

“It's fantastic for simple jobs, I use it for my hobbyist projects because I just need 20 to 30 lines to build and deploy a web build.”

“It has just the right amount of abstractions. I've used many CIs in the past and I'd definitely prefer GA over any of them.”

“GH Actions isn't great compared to other CI systems, but it's also not particularly worse until you get into the nitty gritty details.”

“Setting up my github actions (or gitlab) checks in a way that can easily run locally can be a bit of extra work, but it's not difficult.”

“there’s still seemingly no way to actually debug workflows, run them locally, or rapidly iterate on them in any way”

“All this needing to SSH into runners or needing self-hosted runners or needing act to emulate GitHub Actions is really a failure of the developer experience.”

“One of the biggest problems with GitHub Actions is that, even with fully transitive locking at the action layer, you still can’t really guarantee hermetic execution”

“Part of the advantage is a fully hosted service where you don't need to worry about a control plane managing and scheduling jobs.”

“This change is a very weird one. Because the teams that are capable of setting up their own runners have the means to easily jump ship to another CI platform”

“Paying it and counting it against our total allocated minutes when we bought the machine is going too far though.”

“This pricing model continues to incentivize them not fixing the hundreds of clearly documented issues that causes CI to be incredibly slow”

“CI is guard rails against common failure modes which turn requiring everyone to follow an evolving script into something automatic nobody needs to think about much”

“my experience with GitHub Actions was really poor. Some build that would run perfectly on my local machine and any other servers we have hosted would always time out on GitHub runners”

“Charging by the minute for the user's own resources gives the impression that GitHub is actually trying to disincentivize third-party runners.”

“Github Actions is actually one of the better CI options out there, even if on an absolute scale it is still pretty bad.”

“managing IAM permissions to permit the github runner to do everything the deployment wants is an astonishingly large waste of time”

“When your CI pipeline starts getting complicated or has a bunch of moving parts, not only do you need to rearchitect parts of it, but you lose a lot of stability.”

“Github actions definitely has its warts and missing features, but I'll take managed build services over Jenkins every time.”

“when you actually look at what the vulnerability was, you'll find that for lots of your questions it wasn't GitHub Actions' fault.”

“A way to determine a workflow per branch, inside the branch, is useful for developing workflows. But it's perilous in other circumstances.”

“It's an unfortunately common problem with GitHub Actions, it's easy to set things up to where any PR that's opened against your repo runs the workflows as defined in the branch.”

“Using Namespace made it clear how much cruft GitHub Actions has accumulated and how much performance they leave on the table.”