Launch a Debugging Terminal into GitHub Actions

(blog.gripdev.xyz)

65 points | by martinpeck 3 hours ago

7 comments

  • embedding-shape 8 minutes 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 it became to 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.

  • franktankbank 3 minutes 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??
  • stabbles 30 minutes ago
  • whynotmaybe 2 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

    • nwellinghoff 42 minutes 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.
  • dreslan 2 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!

  • baby_souffle 1 hour 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-shape 5 minutes 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.

  • lawrencegripper 2 hours ago
    Author here, this was something I wrote for fun/because I wanted to use it. Happy to answer any questions
    • Imustaskforhelp 2 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)

      • lawrencegripper 27 minutes ago
        Thanks! I'm not aware of others offering this pricing model