I can’t overstate how much I hate GitHub Actions. I don’t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used. Sure, I still make fun of PHP that I remember from times of PHP41, but even then I didn’t hate it. Merely I found it subpar technology to other emerging at the time (like Ruby on Rails or Django). And yet I hate GitHub Actions.
With Passion2.
Road to Hell
Day before writing these words I was implementing build.rs for my tmplr project. To save you a click - it is a file/project scaffold tool with human readable (and craftable) template files. I (personally) use it very often, given how easy it is to craft new templates, by hand or with aid of the tool, so check it out if you need a similar tool.


Not saying it’s perfect, but every job I’ve been at they’re migrating away from Jenkins. And they never have a reason to do so other than shiny new toy. Jenkins has it’s own problems, but I personally think it’s litterally decades ahead of github actions.
I do like runners better than the default jenkins run baremetal on the server, however the runners are too blackbox. I wish there was a debug toggle on runners. Pause at step, then provide a console into the runner. Some runs litterally take hours, so adding some debug output, and rerunning makes troubleshooting tedious.
I’ve found the edit/test/debug loop in Jenkins to be much faster than Github Actions. It was quite a refreshing change when I made that transition.
Security. Jenkins has issues with every other plugin being a backdoor or version having some vulnerability.
And the Actions in the marketplace aren’t?
My employers have only allowed a very small subset of each. It’s super frustrating having to reinvent the wheel constantly.
I wonder if problems could be mostly avoided by running potentially-unsafe code in a container without network access.
have you looked at solutions which emulate github actions locally?
https://github.com/nektos/act this is one of them but I think I’ve seen one more.
Github actions also has self hosted runners: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/self-hosted-runners
Never found
actuseful. Where I work, we have our own self hosted instance, including self hosted runners and it doesn’t really improve the situation WRT debugging an Action.