Testing GitHub actions locally

How do you test changes to GitHub actions without actually running the action?

This is the problem I faced this week, I wanted to add the ability to see code deployments in JIRA. I followed this tutorial as best as I could, but I didn’t want to really deploy the code every time I changed something in the deploy.yml script.

That’s where act comes in. Using the magic of Docker, this command line tool simulates GitHub runners and allows you to debug the workflow without actually running it!

To avoid running the real deployment script I added this line

if: $

which then reads the event.json file that looked like this:

{
	"act": true
}