this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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46
I Hate Github Actions with Passion (xlii.space)
submitted 1 month 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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[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (14 children)

Huh, I was expecting more. There's so much to hate with github actions!

  • Sometimes you can pass a list, or boolean, but for composite actions you can only pass strings.
  • Open bugs that github actions just doesn't care to fix (I've run across about 3). Most recently, concurrency flag cancel_in_progress doesn't work, and they aren't fixing it.
  • variables often not accessable until next step.
  • API is slow to update. Running jobs querying themselves won't see themselves as running 50% of the time
  • Inability to easily pass vars from one job to another. (output in step, output from job, needs, call) it's 4 lines of code to get a single var accessable in another job.
  • UI doesn't show startup errors. Depending on the error if you make a dumb syntax error in the workflow file, the UI will just say failed to startup. Won't tell you what happened, won't even link it to your PR which kicked it off, you have to go hunting for it.
  • Workflow Dispatch is a joke. Can't run it in a branch, no dynamic inputs, no banners.
  • Can't run schedules in branches.
  • Inconsistent Event Data labels and locations across triggers. Want to get the head sha? It's in a different place for each trigger, same for so many things.
  • Merge Queues have the worst Event Data. They run off a autogenerated branch, and so they fill everything in with actor=mergequeuebot and garbage that is unhelpful. Good luck trying to get the head sha and look up the real info like say the branch name you're merging in. You have to parse it out from a head_ref's description or some junk.
  • No dynamic run names. Well, you can, but you have to call the api and update it. It's a hassle. Why not just let me toss in an @actor, or @branch in the run name? That way when a dev is looking for their instance of "Build Job" from a massive list, they can actually find theirs.
  • garbage documentation

I could go on. I do CI/CD for work and gha is the tool they are having us use. I have no say in the matter.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago (10 children)

What would you use if you had a choice?

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (8 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.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 1 month 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 1 month 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.

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