Using act to build / test Github actions locally

using-act-windows.md

1. Install Act
   • Scoop:
     • Scoop
     • Install act: scoop install act
   • winget:
     • winget install nektos.act
2. Install Docker Desktop, or Rancher Desktop if you can't install Docker Desktop due to the change in licensing
   • Docker Desktop
   • Rancher Desktop
3. If installing Rancher, ensure that you choose dockerd not containerd
4. Install WSL2 support if you don't have it: Install WSL2
   • This is very simple on newer windows builds: wsl --install in a powershell shell.
   • Suggest using the Ubuntu image when it asks.
   • Notes: ensure that you have hardware virtualisation on in your bios and that your WSL system is set to default to version 2!
5. Now we need a repo to test against, so choose one of your repos and add a .github/workflows directory tree to the root of the project.
6. Create a workflow yaml file in that folder e.g. build.yaml
7. Add some initial content to your file e.g.

name: TestCI

# Controls when the action will run. Triggers the workflow on push or pull request
# events but only for the main branch and tags
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - '**'
    tags:
      - '**'
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
 

8. Commit and push the changes.
9. Open the root of your project in powershell and type act
10. Select an image for act to use. Suggested is Medium
11. Wait while act pulls down the required docker image
12. If successful you should see something like this:

[TestCI/build] 🚀  Start image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest
[TestCI/build]   🐳  docker pull image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest platform= username= forcePull=false
[TestCI/build]   🐳  docker create image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest platform= entrypoint=["/usr/bin/tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[]
[TestCI/build]   🐳  docker run image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-latest platform= entrypoint=["/usr/bin/tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[]
[TestCI/build] ⭐ Run Main Checkout
[TestCI/build]   🐳  docker cp src=C:\temp\act-test\. dst=/mnt/c/temp/act-test
[TestCI/build]   ✅  Success - Main Checkout
[TestCI/build] 🏁  Job succeeded

13. Act developement and updates are frequent. To update scoop update act. You may want to update scoop every now and then as well: scoop update