Feel like the correct way to use any CI these days is to just have it do almost nothing. The CI just triggers a script. And then you can run that script locally.

exactly. I am surprised by the amount of comments in this and similar threads praying for github to add more complexity to an already over-complicated and fragile solution.

CI must be local-first and platform-agnostic.

Because you may want caching, or to install certain software in the VM or container that you already have locally. Separating scripts could help, but IME the CI environment is always different enough that some branching or mimicking is needed to harmonize them.

Caching is fine, you likely don’t have to replicate that locally as in theory it should do nothing. For installing software, create a docker image that already has everything you need.

I'm convinced that they specifically won't do that so that people won't use them to build competing products. Actions is one of the pieces that make GitHub money.

> Actions is one of the pieces that make GitHub money.

How do you figure that? I'd buy "lock people in the platform," but in that way GitHub Issues has been the moat for far longer than Actions has

I figure because they charge for minutes, I'm not saying that it actually turns a profit. My company also pays for certain "xl" machines.

Almost every company I know of is in love with self hosted, or 3rd party, runners because they can't reason about OIDC auth into their cloud, or it's more evil sibling VPN

I'm open to your suggestion but I struggle to get onboard that Microsoft thinks that CI compute billing is the future

> GitHub really needs to support local development with GitHub actions.

Agreed. I’m thankful for tools like act, but there really should be an officially supported way to run gh actions locally.