Comment by Storment33
2 days ago
Does not sound like a GitHub failure, sounds it is the company's failure. They haven't invested in the developer experience and they have developers who cannot run stuff locally and are having to push to CI in order to get feedback.
You can't run a GitHub CI pipeline locally (in general; there are some projects to try but they're limited). Even if you make as much of it runnable locally as possible (which you should) you're inevitably going to end up debugging some stuff by making commits and pushing them. Release automation. Test reporting. Artifact upload. Pipeline triggers. Permissions.
Count yourself lucky you've never had to deal with any of that!
Yes there are a few things you can't do locally. But the vast majority of complaints I see 90%+ are for builds/tests etc that should have the same local feedback loops. CI shouldn't be anything special, it should be a 'shell as a service' with some privileged credentials for pushing artefacts.
> Release automation. Test reporting. Artifact upload.
Those I can actually all do locally for my open source projects on GitHub, if I the correct credentials in my env. It is all automated(which I developed/tested locally) but I can break glass if needed.
> Those I can actually all do locally for my open source projects on GitHub
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description, but you definitely can't locally do things like automatically creating a release in a Github workflow, sending test results as a comment to PRs automatically and uploading CI pipeline artifacts locally. Those all intrinsically require running in Github CI.
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Can't do much about that when there is something you're troubleshooting about the CI platform itself. Say you're troubleshooting why the deployment doesn't work, somehow got the environment variable wrong for whatever reason. So you edit and add a "env | sort" before that, commit it, push it, so on. With "rebuilt with ssh", you literally are inside the "job" as it runs.
Yes you can't really debug CI specific stuff locally, like if your setting up build caching or something. But it seems like 90%+ of the time people are complaining about builds/tests that should have local feedback loops.
Yeah, fair point, I see that a lot in the wild too. I guess I kind of assumed we all here had internalized the practice of isolating everything into one command that runs remotely, like "make test" or whatever, rather than what some people do and put entire shellscripts-but-yaml in their pipeline configs.
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