Overview

"Think globally, act locally"

Run your GitHub Actions locally! Why would you want to do this? Two reasons:

• Fast Feedback - Rather than having to commit/push every time you want to test out the changes you are making to your .github/workflows/ files (or for any changes to embedded GitHub actions), you can use act to run the actions locally. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.
• Local Task Runner - I love make. However, I also hate repeating myself. With act, you can use the GitHub Actions defined in your .github/workflows/ to replace your Makefile!

Tip

Now Manage and Run Act Directly From VS Code!
Check out the GitHub Local Actions Visual Studio Code extension which allows you to leverage the power of act to run and test workflows locally without leaving your editor.

How Does It Work?

When you run act it reads in your GitHub Actions from .github/workflows/ and determines the set of actions that need to be run. It uses the Docker API to either pull or build the necessary images, as defined in your workflow files and finally determines the execution path based on the dependencies that were defined. Once it has the execution path, it then uses the Docker API to run containers for each action based on the images prepared earlier. The environment variables and filesystem are all configured to match what GitHub provides.

Let's see it in action with a sample repo!

Act User Guide

Please look at the act user guide for more documentation.

Support

Need help? Ask in discussions!

Contributing

Want to contribute to act? Awesome! Check out the contributing guidelines to get involved.

Manually building from source

• Install Go tools 1.20+ - (https://golang.org/doc/install)
• Clone this repo git clone git@github.com:nektos/act.git
• Run unit tests with make test
• Build and install: make install

Fork CI cache cleanup contract

This fork advertises cache-exact-delete-v1 through act --ci-capabilities --json. The local cache service accepts DELETE <ACTIONS_CACHE_URL>/_apis/artifactcache/cache?key=<exact-key>. The URL's per-server token grants access to that server's namespace; no GitHub credentials are used. Keys match case insensitively, as they do for restore, and never match prefixes. Completed versions of the key are deleted; other keys and in-flight reservations remain.

The response contains schema_version: 1, the requested key, deleted_count and reclaimed_archive_bytes. An absent key returns zero for both counters. Cleanup takes the existing exclusive transfer lock; active transfers return 503 and remain intact. Deletion uses the existing durable intent journal, allowing maintenance to recover interrupted removal.

The shared ci-lint cache heal client selects this API under ACT=true and keeps using GitHub's API on hosted runners. Older servers lack this API and must report unsupported cleanup rather than claim success. Source contract tests cover both sides; published Bosn provider adoption and the Template pilot are tracked in ci.yml issue #362.