Test your GitHub Actions locally with act

Save time and effort using this open source GitHub Actions emulator

We had finally taken the plunge. We were at last bailing on Bitbucket and moving over to GitHub.

I can’t express how absolutely thrilled we were.

I’m not going to bag on Bitbucket. It had served us well for many, many years. That said, by comparison to the amazing and wide-ranging features of GitHub, Bitbucket just couldn’t compete. Advanced security features, dependabot, a powerhouse of APIs and their CLI. It was, frankly, a no-brainer.

There was only one wee snag: We needed to migrate a number of Bitbucket Pipelines over to GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions: A Primer

For those who don’t know, GitHub Actions are GitHub’s answer to CI (Continuous Integration). Like so many other such pipeline systems, Actions are triggered by events in your Git repo, and based on the event and/or the branch(es) in question, will run a series of automated actions.

• Build my code
• Test my code
• Package my code
• Tag / version my code
• Deploy my code
• Send cute notifications to Slack when the above…