Overview

"Think globally, act locally"

Run your GitHub Actions locally! Why would you want to do this? Two reasons:

• Fast Feedback - Rather than having to commit/push every time you want test out the changes you are making to your main.workflow file (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use act to run the actions locally. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.
• Local Task Runner - I love make. However, I also hate repeating myself. With act, you can use the GitHub Actions defined in your main.workflow file to replace your Makefile!

How Does It Work?

When you run act it reads in your GitHub Actions from .github/main.workflow and determines the set of actions that need to be run. It uses the Docker API to either pull or build the necessary images, as defined in your main.workflow file and finally determines the execution path based on the dependencies that were defined. Once it has the execution path, it the uses the Docker API to run containers for each action based on the images prepared earlier. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.

Let's see it in action with a sample repo!

Installation

To install with Homebrew, run:

brew install nektos/tap/act

Alternatively, you can use the following:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nektos/act/master/install.sh | sudo bash

Commands

# List the actions
act -l

# Run the default (`push`) event:
act

# Run a specific event:
act pull-request

# Run a specific action:
act -a test

# Run in dry-run mode:
act -n

# Run in reuse mode to save state:
act -r

Support

Need help? Ask on Gitter!

Contributing

Want to contribute to act? Awesome! Check out the contributing guidelines to get involved.

Building from source

• Install Go tools 1.11+ - (https://golang.org/doc/install)
• Clone this repo git clone git@github.com:nektos/act.git
• Run unit tests with make check
• Build and install: make install