Act: Add support for `--no-container` to run windows/macos

[chenrui333]

Thanks for creating this wonderful tool. It would be nice to have MacOS also supported as well.

[cplee]

All steps for act run in a docker container...not sure how to accomplish that with MacOS runner. Would you want it to NOT use a container and just run the commands directly on the mac that act is running on?

[fwilhe]

Kinda related: Sometime I think you really don't want to run stuff in containers, for example when act is invoked in a container itself which contains the required software already. Not sure if this is in scope, but it would be kind of nice if it had a --no-container flag which would do what it does now, except for using the locally installed tools..

How feasible would this be?

[cplee]

I like the idea @fwilhe - would like to see a flag --no-container that runs all the steps directly on your local workstation, and assumes the right tools are installed. This would enable both windows and macos environments.

[albertofem]

@cplee I have a rough but working implementation I'm using locally to test some macOS-based actions. It should also be easy enough to have it working in Windows. Please take a look here:

https://github.com/nektos/act/compare/master...albertofem:feature/running_on_host?expand=1

If you think this approach is good, I'll go ahead and make the PR once I have a better implementation and have tested extensively on both Mac and Windows.

[cplee]

@albertofem - this looks really promising! What do you think about also supporting --no-container to force the platform to be host?

[jcansdale]

@cplee,

I've been experimenting with running act inside GitHub Codespaces.

If there was a --no-container option to run actions on the host VM, that would be great!

Unfortunately the actions/setup-dotnet action is failing at the moment. I'm guessing this will be the same for many setup actions.

[fwilhe]

In my experience it is a viable workaround for failing setup actions to build a docker image that has everything your build needs. Provides you the same experience locally and in actions if you run your workflow in the image.

[jcansdale]

@fwilhe I did wonder about doing that. It's good to hear that it works well in practice!

Since you can optionally specify an image to use with Codespaces, this could be a good opportunity to sync-up build and development environments. 🤔

[albertofem]

@cplee Yes, I think the flag makes more sense for the general case rather than assuming non-supported hosts. I'm gonna rework my brach and come back as soon as I have something ready for review.

[github-actions[bot]]

Issue is stale and will be closed in 7 days unless there is new activity

[fwilhe]

Not stale. Any updates?

[github-actions[bot]]

Issue is stale and will be closed in 7 days unless there is new activity

[jcansdale]

Still watching and hoping. 🙂