this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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43
I Hate Github Actions with Passion (xlii.space)
submitted 6 days ago by jeena@piefed.jeena.net to c/technology@lemmy.world
28 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 6 days ago (2 children)

What would you use if you had a choice?

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] dublet@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

And they never have a reason to do so other than shiny new toy.

Security. Jenkins has issues with every other plugin being a backdoor or version having some vulnerability.

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 6 days ago

I wonder if problems could be mostly avoided by running potentially-unsafe code in a container without network access.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yep, I think the only thing github actions has over jenkins is built in versioning. I wish in jenkins I could edit a pipeline and easily roll it back. Or even better have tags so if I break something the team can just use the previous tag while I figure it out.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago

Interesting. Were you using a Jenkinsfile? I'm not sure I completely understand your use case, but using a Jenkinsfile would mean that your entire pipeline would be defined in a file in source control, so you could roll it back if you made a change that didn't work quite right. Seems to be what your looking for if I'm understanding what you're looking for.

https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/jenkinsfile/

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] dublet@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

Never found act useful. 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.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 points 6 days ago

I like zuul quite a lot, it's a bit complicated to set up first but once it's runnint's really cool, especially the gating mechanisms can't be found anywhere else and the dependencies between jobs are very intuitive too.