Launch a Debugging Terminal into GitHub Actions

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 :)

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stabbles an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm using tmate for this: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

	▲	Etheryte 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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dreslan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

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whynotmaybe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	nwellinghoff an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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baby_souffle an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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-shape 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

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lawrencegripper 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Author here, this was something I wrote for fun/because I wanted to use it. Happy to answer any questions

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Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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)

	▲	lawrencegripper 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks! I'm not aware of others offering this pricing model

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franktankbank 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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??