• Prerequisists
• Setup
  • Set up act in Codespaces or Windows or anyother OS
  • After set up
    • Example commands
    • Command structure:
    • List the actions for the default event:
    • List the actions for a specific event:
    • Run the default (push) event:
    • Run a specific event:
    • Run a specific job:
    • Run in dry-run mode:
    • Enable verbose-logging (can be used with any of the above commands)
  • Sample Workflow:
  • Sample action
  • JS Action template
  • Running in Codespaces with dry-run mode

Prerequisists

• Docker is needed to be installed because act depends on docker

Setup

Set up act in Codespaces or Windows or anyother OS

1. Start you codespace from GitHub either in directly in VSCode or in the browser
2. Double check if Docker is installed in your codespaces.
3. If yes then act-cli need to be installed

• Either use go if you have it or install it with brew or bash or any other way explained here

Sample commands to install act-cli

• go install github.com/nektos/act@latest
• go install github.com/nektos/act@master

After set up

Once act has been installed on your codespace or windows or anyother OS you will need to clone the repository which workflows and actions you want to run.

Example commands

### Command structure:

act [\<event>] [options]

If no event name passed, will default to "on: push"

### List the actions for the default event:

act -l

### List the actions for a specific event:

act workflow_dispatch -l

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

act

### Run a specific event:

act pull_request

### Run a specific job:

act -j <jobname>

### Run in dry-run mode:

act -n

### Enable verbose-logging (can be used with any of the above commands)

act -v

Sample Workflow:

{% highlight yml %} jobs: hello_world_job: runs-on: ubuntu-latest name: A job to say hello steps: # To use this repository’s private action, # you must check out the repository - name: Checkout uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Hello world action step uses: ./ # Uses an action in the root directory id: hello with: who-to-greet: ‘Mona the Octocat’ # Use the output from the hello step - name: Get the output time run: echo “The time was ${{ steps.hello.outputs.time }}” {% endhighlight %}

Sample action

name: 'Action Name' #*

description: 'short desc' #*

inputs:

  who-to-greet:  # id of input *

    description: 'Who to greet' #*

    required: true #*

    default: 'World'

outputs:

  time: # id of output #*

    description: 'The time we greeted you' #*

runs: #* Configures the path to the action's code and the application used to execute the code.

  using: 'node12' #* application used to execute the code

  main: 'index.js' #* file that contains the action code

	

JS Action template

const core = require('@actions/core');
const github = require('@actions/github');
	try {
  // `who-to-greet` input defined in action metadata file

  const nameToGreet = core.getInput('who-to-greet');
  console.log(`Hello ${nameToGreet}!`);
  const time = (new Date()).toTimeString();
  core.setOutput("time", time);
  // Get the JSON webhook payload for the event that triggered the workflow

  const payload = JSON.stringify(github.context.payload, undefined, 2)
  console.log(`The event payload: ${payload}`);
} catch (error) {
  core.setFailed(error.message);
}

Running in Codespaces with dry-run mode