Run builds locally

When creating or enhancing GitHub Actions builds it is a problem to test the build. After each change you need to commit and check the build result. This leads to a lot of unnecessary commits.

Therefor it is needed to run the build locally on the developer PC. The tool which enabled this is act. It uses Docker to create a build runner and executes the GitHub Actions build with it.

act can by installed by Chocolatey by this single command: choco install act-cli.

We use the Medium Docker Image for our MOOSE builds to work properly. Unfortunately the docker images used by act are not as up to date as the images used by GitHub Actions. So we needed to add a build step with sudo apt-get -qq update.

The build jobs needs TOKENS to run properly. So you have to create a PAT (Personal Access Token). A classic Token with read rights is enough to run the build, as long as don’t want to push the results.

The push step is only executed if the variable FORCE_PUSH with value true is set.

  • This is only needed if the push step itself must be change and tested!
  • Add parameter --var FORCE_PUSH=true to your act commando.
  • You and your PAT needs write access to the target repos, too.

Save your PAT in the file .secrets in the main folder of the MOOSE repository. This file is added to .gitignore, so it is not recognized by git for commits. Add the following line to .secrets:

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BOT_TOKEN=<your PAT>

To run the builds use these commands:

  • act push -W .github/workflows/build-includes.yml
  • act push -W .github/workflows/build-docs.yml