How to run GitHub Actions workflows locally?

Question

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 1

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

Answer 2

You can use nektos/act which supports yaml syntax since 0.2.0 (prerelease).

Check out their latest release.