GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst

https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-package-manager.html

by robin_reala • 8 months ago

444 262 8 months ago

saagarjha3• 8 months ago

What’s more, GitHub has basically stopped maintaining their own actions, pushing people to sketchy forks to do basic things. Their entire ecosystem is basically held up with duct tape and gets very little investment.

bilekas• 8 months ago

That issue with their own small private forks has actually raised its head while testing out the AI slop generator thing it has, making anything it produces for you not self hoatable unless you rewrite a lot of basic functions. Sweet irony.

mhitza• 8 months ago

With AI you won't need CI anymore, it's all going straight to prod anyway /s

Actions is one thing, but after all these years where the new finegrained access tokens aren't still supported across all the product endpoints (and the wack granularity) is more telling about their lack of investment in maintenance.

Cthulhu_• 8 months ago

Which is strange because they have infinite Microsoft money and can print more if they get it into enterprises.

(we run a private gitlab instance and a merge request can spawn hundreds of jobs, that's a lot of potential Gitlab credits)

crote2• 8 months ago

This is the first time I've heard of this, do you happen to have an example?

anentropic• 8 months ago

https://github.com/orgs/actions/repositories?language=&q=&so...

https://github.com/actions/create-release

coryrc• 8 months ago

https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aactions+%22we+are+allocati...

i.e. from https://github.com/actions/cache/?tab=readme-ov-file#note

   Thank you for your interest in this GitHub repo, however, right now we are not taking contributions.

   We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in.

mixedbit• 8 months ago

An interesting things is that GitHub is an expensive service and my guess would be that MS makes good money on it. Our small company paid about 200+ USD monthly for GitHub, much larger cumulative cost than Windows licenses. My believe was that Windows is getting worse, because it is considered legacy business by MS in favor of new offerings such as GitHub subscriptions.

samhh• 8 months ago

I was surprised to learn that Depot runners, which are much faster, are also much cheaper. Would highly recommend them for anyone trapped on GitHub.

Ygg2• 8 months ago

My believe was that Windows is getting worse, because it is considered legacy business by MS in favor of new offerings such as GitHub subscriptions.

What if GH actions is considered legacy business in favour of LLMs?

eviks2• 8 months ago

The legacy business usually explains why there are no new features, only minor maintenance, it doesn't explain why there is a lot of investment into work that makes it worse

blibble• 8 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some plan to make all of GitHub's backend "legacy"

and switch everyone to the dumpster fire that is Azure DevOps

and if you thought GitHub Actions was bad...

Normal_gaussian• 8 months ago

Very many more people use Windows to GitHub.

GitHub also runs a free tier with significant usage.

There are ~1.4b paid instances of Windows 10/11 desktop; and ~150m Monthly active accounts on GitHub, of which only a fraction are paid users.

Windows is generating something in the region of $30b/yr for MS, and GitHub is around $2b/yr.

MS have called out that Copilot is responsible for 40% of revenue growth in GitHub.

Windows isn't what developers buy, but it is what end users buy. There are a lot more end users than developers. Developers are also famously stingy. However, in both products the margin is in the new tech.

rurban2• 8 months ago

github doesn't pay microsoft for the azure runners. that's why they came up with actions at all. microsoft gets streetcreds for stable runners, github could replace travis and appveyor.

Hamuko3• 8 months ago

It's not really that expensive. GitHub Enterprise is like $21/month/user while GitLab Ultimate was $100/month/user the last time GitLab published prices. These days GitLab Ultimate is "contact us for pricing" while the cheaper GitLab Premium is $29/month/user.

I guess Bitbucket is cheaper but you'll lose the savings in your employees bitching about Bitbucket to each other on Slack.

silverwind• 8 months ago

The quality of setup-* actions has definitely gone down and there are a lot of strange decisions being made. I assume the original authors of these actions have long left the company.

miohtama3• 8 months ago

Everyone is free to use alternative CI/CD workflow pipelines. These are often better than Github Actions.

These include

- https://circleci.com/

- https://www.travis-ci.com/

- Gitlab

Open source:

- https://concourse-ci.org/ (discussed in the context of Radicle here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658820 )

- Jenkins

-etc.

Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.

ramon1562• 8 months ago

according to travis-ci, Microsoft uses that? Lol

koakuma-chan• 8 months ago

Or roll your own

saagarjha3• 8 months ago

I’d appreciate not being called lazy for mentioning a lack of investment on Microsoft’s side to secure their paid and fairly lucrative service that they bought a popular code hosting platform to integrate with.

CamouflagedKiwi2• 8 months ago

I've used CircleCI quite a bit in the past; it was pretty good. Feels tough for them to compete with GHA though when you're getting GHA credits for free with your code hosting.

I used Travis rather longer ago, it was not great. Circle was a massive step forward. I don't know if they have improved it since but it only felt useful for very simplistic workflows, as soon as you needed anything complex (including any software that didn't come out of the box) you were in a really awkward place.

c0balt• 8 months ago

It should be highlighted that Gitlab CI/CD (self-hostable runner and GitLab itself) is also OSS.

klausa2• 8 months ago

I don’t make the purchasing decision for my employer, but I certainly have to deal with their fallout, so I’ll keep complaining if that’s okay with you.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 8 months ago

unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise

I used to work for a Japanese company, and one of their core philosophies was “Don’t complain, unless you have a solution.” In my experience, this did not always have optimal outcomes: https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/

NamlchakKhandro• 8 months ago

CircleCI is 100% trash.

Don't waste your time

Bombthecat2• 8 months ago

I'm a huge fan of: https://onedev.io/ it might not the best, but it's fast it and does it's job!

gabrielgio• 8 months ago

Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.

Once I'm encharged of budge decisions of my company I'll make sure that none will go to any MS and Atlassian product. Until then I'll keep complaining.

XCabbage• 8 months ago

Well, actually, no, not everyone is free to use alternatives. Anyone using CI for "Trusted Publishing" of packages to PyPI or npm needs to use GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. CircleCI and Travis CI are not supported. So many big open source projects for the two most popular languages in the world are now locked out of the alternatives you propose.

(I find it extremely sketchy from a competition law perspective that Microsoft, as the owner of npm, has implemented a policy banning npm publishers from publishing via competitors to GitHub Actions - a product that Microsoft also owns. But they have; that is the reality right now, whether it's legal or not.)

dimgl• 8 months ago

I tried to use CircleCI and I gotta say, it is absolutely not better than GitHub Actions…

zulban• 8 months ago

It sounds like you've never worked in a large org before.

Bombthecat2• 8 months ago

Didn't they announce to slow down development for AI?

souenzzo• 8 months ago

you just described every microsoft business model.

vbezhenar2• 8 months ago

I never used any actions and never understood why would I need to. I just wrote bash script to build my project and that's about it. This modern tendency to add dependencies for trivial things baffles me. You don't need "action" to do `git clone`.

esafak3• 8 months ago

bash scripts are as inscrutable as any GHA.

wnevets• 8 months ago

Their entire ecosystem is basically held up with duct tape and gets very little investment.

That isn't gonna get better anytime soon.

"GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development" [1]

[1] https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

amarant• 8 months ago

Hey at least we can all expect lots of extra days off because "GitHub is down" once they're done with that migration!

sebazzz• 8 months ago

Except actions/ai-task. Im sure that one will come.

gregoryl• 8 months ago

They barely maintain Azure pipeline tasks / actions as well.

We had a critical outage because they deprecated Windows 2019 agents a month earlier than scheduled. MS support had the gall to both blame us for not migrating sooner, and refuse to escalate for 36 hours!

dwroberts• 8 months ago

Pleased this is being discussed somewhere as it’s something that has troubled me for a while.

There are so many third party actions where the docs or example reference the master branch. A quick malicious push and they can presumably exfiltrate data from a ton of repositories

(Even an explicit tag is vulnerable because it can just be moved still, but master branch feels like not even trying)

amluto5• 8 months ago

The researchers identified four fundamental security properties that CI/CD systems need: admittance control, execution control, code control, and access to secrets.

Why do CI/CD systems need access to secrets? I would argue need access to APIs and they need privileges to perform specific API calls. But there is absolutely nothing about calling an API that fundamentally requires that the caller know a secret.

I would argue that a good CI/CD system should not support secrets as a first-class object at all. Instead steps may have privileges assigned. At most there should be an adapter, secure enclave style, that may hold a secret and give CI/CD steps the ability to do something with that secret, to be used for APIs that don’t support OIDC or some other mechanism to avoid secrets entirely.

cyberax3• 8 months ago

You might want (or _need_) to sign your binary, for example. Or you might want to trigger a deployment.

Github actually is doing something right here. You can set it up as a trusted identity provider in AWS, and then use Github to assume a role in your AWS account. And from there, you can get access to credentials stored in Secret Manager or SSM.

DuncanCoffee• 8 months ago

Yeah I sign my project APKs so people can install them from the action's artefact

  - name: Retrieve keystore for apk signing
    env:
      KEYSTORE: ${{ secrets.KEYSTORE }}
      run: echo "$KEYSTORE" | base64 --decode > /home/runner/work/keystore.pfk

jdeastwood2• 8 months ago

Yes, their oidc setup was probably their last good feature back when they were actually delivering features back in 2020ish. Everyone else copied it within a few months though.

PunchyHamster2• 8 months ago

I would argue that a good CI/CD system should not support secrets as a first-class object at all. Instead steps may have privileges assigned. At most there should be an adapter, secure enclave style, that may hold a secret and give CI/CD steps the ability to do something with that secret, to be used for APIs that don’t support OIDC or some other mechanism to avoid secrets entirely.

CI/CD does not exist in the vacuum. If you had CI/CD entirely integrated with the rest of the infrastructure it might be possible to do say an app deploy without passing creds to user code (say have the platform APIs that it can call to do the deployment instead of typical "install the client, get the creds, run k8s/ssh/whatever else needed for deploy").

But that's a high level of integration that's very environment specific, and without all that many positives (so what you don't need creds, you still have permission to do a lot of mess if it gets hijacked), and a lot, lot more code to write vs "run a container and pass it some env vars" that had become a standard

Kinrany5• 8 months ago

CI shouldn't do deployments, deployment pipelines should run separately when a new release passes CI

Of course the general purpose task runner that both run on does need to support secrets

amluto5• 8 months ago

You seem to be talking mostly about the CD part. Some thoughts:

On the one hand, CD workflows are less exposed than CI workflows. You only deploy code that has made it through your review and CI processes. In a non-continuous deployment model, you only deploy code when you decide to. You are not running your CD workflow on a third-party pull request.

On the other hand, the actual CD permission is a big deal. If you leak a credential that can deploy to your k8s cluster, you are very, very pwned. Possibly in a manner that is extremely complex to recover from.

I also admit that I find it rather surprising that so many workflows have a push model of deployment like this. My intuition for how to design a CD-style system would be:

1. A release is tagged in source control.

2. Something consumes that release tag and produces a production artifact. This might be some sort of runner that checks out the tagged release, builds it, and produces a ghcr image. Bonus points if that process is cleanly reproducible and more bonus points if there's also an attestation that the release artifact matches the specified tag and all the build environment inputs. (I think that GitHub Actions can do this, other than the bonus points, without any secrets.)

3. Something tells production to update to the new artifact. Ideally this would trigger some kind of staged deployment. Maybe it's continuous, maybe it needs manual triggering. I think that, in many production systems, this could be a message from the earlier stages that tells an agent with production privileges to download and update. It really shouldn't be that hard to make a little agent in k8s or whatever that listens to an API call from a system like GitHub Actions, authenticates it using OIDC, and follows its deployment instructions.

P.S. An attested-reproducible CD build system might be an interesting startup idea.

zahlman2• 8 months ago

But there is absolutely nothing about calling an API that fundamentally requires that the caller know a secret.

There is if you pay for API access, surely?

hinkley4• 8 months ago

CI is arguable, but how do you intend to do deployments with no secrets?

themafia• 8 months ago

AWS is great for this. IAM policies can allow IP Addresses or more safely just named EC2 instances. Our deploy server requires nothing.

gcr8• 8 months ago

The secret is held by the metadata server that the CI instance has access to

Or: the deployment service knows the identity of the instance, so its secret is its private key

Or, how PyPI does it: the deployment service coordinates with the trusted CI/CD service to learn the identity of the machine (like its IP address, or a trusted assertion of which repository it’s running on), so the secret is handled in however that out-of-band verification step happens. (PyPI communicates with Github Actions about which pipeline from which repository is doing the deployment, for example)

It’s still just secrets all the way down

barrkel3• 8 months ago

How do you e.g. validate that a database product works with all the different cloud databases? Every time you change up SQL generation you're going to want to make sure the SQL parses and evaluates as expected on all supported platforms.

Those tests will need creds to access third party database endpoints.

qznc• 8 months ago

We use proprietary tools (QNX compiler, Coverity static analysis, ...) and those require access to a license server which requires some secret.

I don't really understand what you mean by "secure enclave style"? How would that be different?

amluto5• 8 months ago

With a secure enclave or an HSM, there's a secret, but the users do not have access to the secret. So, if you have a workflow that needs to, say, sign with a given private key, you would get an API that signs for you. If you need to open a TLS connection with a client certificate, you get a proxy that authenticates for you.

I suppose I would make an exception for license keys. Those have minimal blast radii if they leak.

gcr8• 8 months ago

“Good CI systems shouldn’t support secrets, at most there should be [the most complicated secret support ever]”

Let’s just call it secret support.

I agree with your suggestion that capabilities-based APIs are better, but CI/CD needs to meet customers where they’re at currently, not where they should be. Most customers need secrets.

nijave3• 8 months ago

While good in theory, in practice secrets are used to validate those privileges have been assigned. Even in schemes like metadata servers, you still use a secret.

Pedantically I'd say maybe it's more fair to say they shouldn't have access to long lived secrets and should only use short lived values.

The "I" stands for Integration so it's inevitable CI needs to talk to multiple things--at the very least a git repo which most cases requires a secret to pull.

LtWorf2• 8 months ago

Because for some reason they use the same system to do releases and sign them and publish them.

woodruffw5• 8 months ago

I would argue that a good CI/CD system should not support secrets as a first-class object at all. Instead steps may have privileges assigned. At most there should be an adapter, secure enclave style, that may hold a secret and give CI/CD steps the ability to do something with that secret, to be used for APIs that don’t support OIDC or some other mechanism to avoid secrets entirely.

This all seems right, but the reality is that people will put secrets into CI/CD, and so the platform should provide an at least passably secure mechanism for them.

(A key example being open source: people want to publish from CI, and they’re not going to set up additional infrastructure when the point of using third-party CI is to avoid that setup.)

amluto5• 8 months ago

Fine. Then let people set up a little WASM app that gets access to the secret and has an API callable by the workflow. And make that app be configured as part of the secret’s configuration, not as a file in the repository.

lionkor• 8 months ago

You're missing that the D in CI/CD means deployment; be that packaging on pushing tags and publishing to a registry, or building images, or packaging github releases.

duped2• 8 months ago

Why do CI/CD systems need access to secrets?

Because you need to be able to sign/notarize with private keys and deploy to cloud environments. Both of these require secrets known to the runner.

cyberax3• 8 months ago

Yep. I'm switching our workflows to instead use regular utilities running inside a Docker container.

This works well for _most_ things. There are some issues with doing docker-in-docker for volume mapping, but they're mostly trivial. We're using taskfiles to run tasks, so I can just rely on it for that. It also has a built-in support for nice output grouping ( https://taskfile.dev/docs/reference/schema#output ) that Github actions can parse.

Pros:

1. Ability to run things in parallel.

2. Ability to run things _locally_ in a completely identical environment.

3. It's actually faster!

4. No vendor lock-in. Offramp to github runners and eventually local runners?

Cons:

It often takes quite a while to understand how actions work when you want to run them in your own environment. For example, how do you get credentials to access the Github Actions cache and then pass them to Docker? Most of documentation just tells: "Use this Github Action and stop worrying your pretty little head about it".

battesonb• 8 months ago

Do you have a write up about this? Actions are great, but my #2 gripe with actions, after the tenuous security posture, is that the default practice is not to run/validate actions locally.

cyberax3• 8 months ago

I don't. Will do soon.

baq4• 8 months ago

Normally I’d say stop kicking the dead horse, but GHA deserves all the complaints it gets and then some. It’s the embodiment of everything that’s bad in ‘less is more’.

My biggest concern with it is that it’s somehow the de facto industry standard. You could do so much better with relatively small investments, but MS went full IE6 with it… and now there’s a whole generation of young engineers who don’t know how short their end of the stick actually is since they never get to compare it to anything.

zahlman2• 8 months ago

I'm accustomed to just doing as much as possible locally. GHA doesn't even seem like a value-add over that for me.

bjackman• 8 months ago

It's funny that absolutely everything about GHA fucking sucks, and everyone agrees about this. BUT, the fact that it's free compute, and it's "right there"... means it's very very difficult to say no to!

Personally I've just retired a laptop and I'm planning to turn it into a little home server. I think I'm gonna try spinning up Woodpecker on there, I'm curious to see what a CI system people don't hate is like to live with!

kminehart• 8 months ago

I can already tell by their example that I don't like it. I've worked with a bunch of different container-based CI systems and I'm getting a little tired seeing the same approach by done slightly differently.

    steps:
      - name: backend
        image: golang
        commands:
          - go build
          - go test
      - name: frontend
        image: node
        commands:
          - npm install
          - npm run test
          - npm run build

Yes, it's easy to read and understand and it's container based, so it's easy to extend. I could probably intuitively add on to this. I can't say the same for GitHub, so it has that going for it.

But the moment things start to get a little complex then that's when the waste starts happening. Eventually you're going to want to _do_ something with the artifacts being built, right? So what does that look like?

Immediately that's when problems start showing up...

- You'll probably need a separate workflow that defines the same thing, but again, only this time combining them into a Docker image or a package.

    - I am only now realizing that woodpecker is a fork of Drone. This was a huuuge issue in Drone. We ended up using Starlark to generate our drone yaml because it lacked any kind of reusability and that was a big headche.

- If I were to only change a `frontend` file or a `backend` file, then I'm probably going to end up wasting time and compute rebuilding the same artifacts over and over.

    - GitHub's free component honestly hurts itself here. I don't have to care about waste if it's mostly free anyways.

- Running locally using the local backend... looks like a huge chore. In Drone this was basically impossible.

I really wish someone would take a step back and really think about the problems being solved here and where the current tooling fails us. I don't see much effort being put into the things that really suck about github actions (at least for me): legibility, waste, and the feedback loop.

duped2• 8 months ago

absolutely everything about GHA fucking sucks

By adding one file to your git repo, you get cross-platform build & test of your software that can run on every PR. If your code is open source, it's free(ish) too.

It feels like a weekend project that a couple people threw together and then has been held together by hope and prayers with more focus on scaling it than making it well designed.

mvc• 8 months ago

there’s a whole generation of young engineers who don’t know how short their end of the stick actually is

I'm from a generation who had to use VSS for a few years. The sticks are pretty long these days, even the ones you get from github.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 8 months ago

VSS

I just had trauma!

I will say that SourceSafe had one advantage: You could create "composite" proxy workspaces.

You could add one or two files from one workspace, and a few from another, etc. The resulting "avatar" workspace would act like they were all in the same workspace. It was cool.

However, absolutely everything else sucked.

I don't miss it.

Raed667• 8 months ago

To get something of a lockfile you can use the hash of the version you want to pin your dependencies:

actions/checkout@f43a0e5ff2bd294095638e18286ca9a3d1956744

barrkel3• 8 months ago

Transitive dependencies?

Kovah• 8 months ago

Yeah, only works if all used Actions would use SHAs too, which is not the case.

Positive example: https://github.com/codecov/codecov-action/blob/96b38e9e60ee6... Negative example: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/54808ecff253fb71615161...

cyphar• 8 months ago

TFA mentions this option and then goes on at some length to explain that this doesn't help for transitive dependencies, which is how these attacks usually work.

TrianguloY2• 8 months ago

I'm not sure I follow.

If I write actions/setup-python@v1, I'm expecting the action to run with the v1 tag of that repository. If I rerun it, I expect it to run with the v1 tag of that repository...which I'm aware may not be the same if the tag was updated.

If I instead use actions/setup-python@27b31702a0e7fc50959f5ad993c78deac1bdfc29 then I'm expecting the action to run with that specific commit. And if I run it again it will run with the same commit.

So, whether you choose the tag or the commit depends on whether you trust the repository or not, and if you want automatic updates. The option is there...isn't it?

barrkel3• 8 months ago

You specifying the top level hash doesn't do anything to pin transitive dependencies, and as the article points out, transitive dependencies - especially dependencies common to a lot of actions - would be the juciest target for a supply chain attack.

TrianguloY2• 8 months ago

Ah, I see it now. Thanks!

eviks2• 8 months ago

which I'm aware may not be the same if the tag was updated.

That's the mistake that breaks the following. People don't usually expect that it's an arbitrary modifiable reference, but instead that it's the same version they've picked when they created the file (ie a tag is just a human friendly name for a commit)

LoganDark2• 8 months ago

I checked out the linked GitHub repo https://github.com/ecosyste-ms/package-manager-resolvers and it appears to be just a README.md that collects summaries of different package managers? How do I know these weren't just LLM-generated?

regularfry4• 8 months ago

You don't, but that's the wrong question. How do you know they're accurate?

LoganDark2• 8 months ago

I feel it's not that controversial to treat LLM output as unreliable without proper verification. So even if the output were accurate, if it's LLM-generated without proper verification I don't trust it.

pjc50• 8 months ago

This is making me feel quietly vindicated in pushing back on migrating our Jenkins/Ansible setup to GHA simply because corporate wanted the new shiny thing. Fortunately the "this will be a lot of work, i.e. cost" argument won.

Mind you, CI does always involve a surprising amount of maintenance. Update churn is real. And Macs still are very much more fiddly to treat as "cattle" machines.

ramon1562• 8 months ago

Lol at my first job I migrated our setup from GHA to Jenkins. I think they eventually went back to GHA

Current job is using blacksmith to save on costs, but the reality of it is that this caching layer only adds costs in some of our projects

sureglymop• 7 months ago

CI is interesting because what really happens is you run a script on someone elses computer but with fairly weird constraints.

I get it's use, especially in large companies and I also get the culture leading up to it being widely used but I can't help but chuckle a bit about the problems we cause for ourselves in this industry.

bloppe2• 8 months ago

While I hate defending GHA, the docs do include this:

- Using the commit SHA of a released action version is the safest for stability and security.

- If the action publishes major version tags, you should expect to receive critical fixes and security patches while still retaining compatibility. Note that this behavior is at the discretion of the action's author.

So you can basically implement your own lock file, although it doesn't work for transitive deps unless those are specified by SHA as well, which is out of your control. And there is an inherent trade-off in terms of having to keep abreast if critical security fixes and updating your hashes, which might count as a charitable explanation for why using hashes is less prevalent.

bramblerose• 8 months ago

- Using the commit SHA of a released action version is the safest for stability and security.

This is not true for stability in practice: the action often depends on a specific Node version (which may not be supported by the runner at some point) and/or a versioned API that becomes unsupported. I've had better luck with @main.

bloppe2• 8 months ago

Depends what you mean by stability. The post is complaining about the lack of lockfiles, and the problem you describe would also be an issue with lockfiles.

amake• 8 months ago

it doesn't work for transitive deps unless those are specified by SHA as well, which is out of your control

So in other words the strategy in the docs doesn't actually address the issue

WillDaSilva• 8 months ago

There's a repository setting you can enable to prevent actions from running unless they have their version pinned to a SHA digest. This setting applies transitively, so while you can't force your dependencies to use SHA pinning for their dependencies, you can block any workflow from running if it doesn't.

onionisafruit• 8 months ago

On the other hand, this issue has been known to GitHub since shortly after Actions’ release[0]. They added some cya verbiage to their docs, but they never followed up by making version pinning meaningful.

Sure you can implement it yourself for direct dependencies and decide to only use direct dependencies that also use commit sha pinning, but most users don’t even realize it’s a problem to begin with. The users who know often don’t bother to use shas anyway.

Or GitHub could spend a little engineer time on a feasible lock file solution.

I say this as somebody who actually likes GitHub Actions and maintains a couple of somewhat well-used actions in my free time. I use sha pinning in my composite actions and encourage users to do the same when using them, but when I look at public repos using my actions it’s probably 90% using @v1, 9% @v1.2 and 1% using commit shas.

[0] Actions was the first Microsoft-led project at GitHub — from before the acquisition was even announced. It was a sign of things to come that something as basic as this was either not understood or swept under the rug to hit a deadline.

csomar• 8 months ago

Using an SHA is an anti-pattern for me. Because by using one, you kind of modeled "I am getting this fixed/static thing"; when in reality, it is very far from that. I got bitten by it twice that I learned that you either have a lock file or you don't.

Griffinsauce2• 8 months ago

Wait, can you explain how you _don't_ get a static thing from a SHA?

bluenose69• 8 months ago

I agree 100% with what I think is the key phrase, viz. "the results can change without any modification to your code".

I maintain an R package that is quite stable and is widely used. But every month or so, the GHA on one of the R testing machines will report an error. The messages being quite opaque, I typically spend a half hour trying to see if my code is doing something wrong. And then I simply make a calendar item to recheck it each day for a while. Sure enough, the problems always go away after a few days.

This might be specific to R, though.

worldsayshi3• 8 months ago

I've not understood the propensity for using yaml for CI pipelines and workflows in general. A decent programming language would be a big improvement.

Why not just build the workflows themselves as docker images? I guess running other docker images in the workflow would then become a problem.

trueno• 8 months ago

it's wild I can wiz through a ton of code for hours on end but seeing a yaml file for something like a CI pipeline actually makes my brain eject i dunno why. my brain has some sort of proverbial capacity limit with how many different configuration-file looking things I can tolerate in a day, and the prospect of becoming intimately familiar with what is effectively an auto integration presented to me as some sort of config makes me completely unjustifiably butthurt for no reason. have i not suffered enough needless and often times limiting abstractions already

sofixa4• 8 months ago

I've not understood the propensity for using yaml for CI pipelines and workflows in general. A decent programming language would be a big improvement.

Because it's clear to write and read. You don't want your CI/CD logic to end up being spaghetti because a super ninja engineer decided they can do crazy stuff just because they can. Same reason why it's a bad idea to create your infrastructure directly in a programming language (unless creating infrastructure is a core part of your software).

Why not just build the workflows themselves as docker images? I guess running other docker images in the workflow would then become a problem.

That's how Drone CI handled it. GitLab kind of does the same, where you always start as a docker image, and thus if you have a custom one with an entrypoint, it does whatever you need it to.

weakfish3• 8 months ago

IME on a Pulumi for IaC team, writing infra in a real language (TypeScript) is MILES better than- you can do conditions, have typed outputs, etc and not have it be a bastardized imperative YAML mess.

YAML is fine for data, but inevitably stuff like workflows end up tacking on imperative features to a declarative language.

shepherdjerred• 8 months ago

Dagger does what you're describing: https://dagger.io/

worldsayshi3• 8 months ago

Neat! Sounds like Pulumi for workflows.

Also, using the dagger github action should make the transition easier I suppose: https://github.com/dagger/dagger-for-github

novok• 8 months ago

After having to deal with shell rc files causing chaos and unpredictability, I can appreciate your top level code fundamental not being random code but something that is parsable and not subject to the halting problem.

tom1337• 8 months ago

We are currently using GitHub Actions for all our CI tasks and I hate it. Yes, the marketplace is nice and there are a lot of utility actions which make life easier, but they all come with the issues the post highlights. Additionally, testing Actions locally is a nightmare. I know that act exists but for us it wasn't working most of the time. Also the whole environment management is kinda odd to me and the fact, that when using an environment (which then allows to access secrets set in that environment) it always creates a new deployment is just annoying [1]

I guess the best solution is to just write custom scripts in whatever language one prefers and just call those from the CI runner. Probably missing out on some fancy user interfaces but at least we'd no longer be completely locked into GHA...

[1] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/36919

ignoramous• 8 months ago

Some teams vendor actions into their own repos. zizmor is excellent at scanning workflows and finding security issues. But these are workarounds for a system that lacks the basics.

Harsh given GitHub makes it very easy to setup attestations for Artifact (like build & sbom) provenances.

That said, Zizmor (static analyser for GitHub Actions) with Step Security's Harden Runner (a runtime analyser) [0] pair nicely, even if the latter is a bit of an involved setup.

[0] https://github.com/step-security/harden-runner

The fix is a lockfile.

Hopefully, SLSA drafts in Hermetic build process as a requirement: https://slsa.dev/spec/v1.2/future-directions

woodruffw5• 8 months ago

I’d say that GitHub has done an admirable job making attestations more accessible, but that “easy” is still a stretch of a characterization: it’s still not the default, and the error/configuration states are somewhat opaque (e.g. around OIDC permissions, unprivileged triggers, what constitutes a signing identity in a reusable workflow context, etc.). Some of these are latent complexities that GitHub can’t be blamed for, but some are certainly made worse by architectural decisions in GitHub Actions.

pshirshov• 8 months ago

Run Nix atop of Actions, minimize the amount of actions you depend on. That works. As a bonus, you now can run your flows locally too.

I have a little launcher for that which helps: https://github.com/7mind/mudyla

_cenw• 8 months ago

See also this excellent video essay by fasterthanlime: GitHub Actions Feels Bad[1].

I'm pretty sure it contains the exact line of it being "deeply confused about being a package manager".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qljpi5jiMQ

IshKebab3• 8 months ago

The core problem is the lack of a lockfile. Every other package manager figured this out decades ago

Well... not Pip!

thangngoc89• 8 months ago

I would recommend you to try uv for this.

notatallshaw• 8 months ago

We're getting there https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/cli/pip_lock/ !

Pip has been a flag bearer for Python packaging standards for some time now, so that alternatives can implement standards rather than copy behavior. So first a lock file standard had to be agreed upon which finally happened this year: https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/

Now it's a matter of a maintainer, who are currently all volunteers donating their spare time, to fully implement support. Progress is happening but it is a little slow because of this.

domenkozar• 8 months ago

What if GitHub Actions were local-first and built using Nix (proper locking)?

https://github.com/cachix/cloud.devenv.sh

no_wizard2• 8 months ago

Hosted code on GitHub no less

Group_B• 8 months ago

I was just writing about how crazy it is to use the third-party ssh tool

https://broderic.blog/post/moving-away-from-netlify/

carschno2• 8 months ago

It is concerning that GitHub hosts the majority of open-source software, while actively locking its users into a platform that is based on closed source for eerything except Git itself. This issue with Actions shows how maintaining proprietary software inevitably ends up rather low on the priority list. Adding new features is much more marketable, just like for any other software product. Enshittification ensues.

For those who can still escape the lock-in, this is probably a good occasion to point to Forgejo, an open-source alternative that also has CI actions: https://forgejo.org/2023-02-27-forgejo-actions/ It is used by Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/

mfenniak• 8 months ago

On the plus side, Forgejo Action's implementation is still actively improving, where it seems that for GitHub if it's not AI, it's not being touched.

However, as noted in the article, Forgejo's implementation currently has all the same "package manager" problems.

carschno2• 8 months ago

Good point, also to illustrate that open-source is not a panacea. It merely holds a higher potential for certain issues to be fixed/improved than.

esafak3• 8 months ago

I don't know why they basically copied GHA.

OptionOfT• 8 months ago

The container manager is horrible.

When you have a multi-platform image the actual per-platforms are usually not tagged. No point.

But that doesn't mean that they are untagged.

So on GitHub Actions when you upload a multi-platform image the per-platform show up in the untagged list. And you can delete them, breaking the multi-platform image, as now it points to blobs that don't exist anymore.

jnwatson• 8 months ago

I committed the project I maintain to GitHub Actions when Actions first came out, and I'm really starting to regret it.

The main problem, which this article touches, is that GHA adds a whole new dimension of dependency treadmill. You now have a new set of upstreams that you have to keep up to date along with your actual deployment upstreams.

esafak3• 8 months ago

renovatebot and dependabot can take care of that. Setting up CI is progress, nothing to regret.

btown• 8 months ago

Has anyone built a “deep fork” tool that lets you make a private fork of all dependencies, then modifies their transitive dependencies to point to private forks, and so on? Ideally in a way where updates can be pulled in manually? Seems feasible.

gwbas1c2• 8 months ago

Has anyone built a “deep fork” tool that lets you make a private fork of all dependencies, then modifies their transitive dependencies to point to private forks, and so on? Ideally in a way where updates can be pulled in manually? Seems feasible.

If you do, please submit a "show HN." I'd love to use it.

figmert• 8 months ago

A lot of the actions people tend to use are just unnecessary. They're simple wrappers around real tools. In those cases, use mise-en-place. It's a single action that installs all relevant tools (and keeps your local dev env in check), and it supports lock files.

RSHEPP• 8 months ago

This right here - I am migrating all of our GHA to use the mise action. Makes keeping the version of Go, linters, formatters etc. for the project so much easier. Haven't added the mise.lock yet, but on the list. Now getting my small team of devs to try using mise is much harder.

akvadrako• 8 months ago

And if not mise, just a Makefile, shell scripts or custom docker images. Then you can run and develop them locally.

GitHub actions has some rough edges around caching, but all the packaging is totally unimportant and best avoided.

curcbit• 8 months ago

microsoft never changes

DalekBaldwin• 8 months ago

I'm assuming the lockfile should be checked into the repo itself, which presents a bootstrapping problem if you have to run an action to create the lockfile in the first place. They may need to build proper support for running actions locally -- there is the third-party https://github.com/nektos/act tool which might be a starting point, but that's mostly designed so you can debug actions without having to repeatedly push and rerun. Probably they'll need a separate mechanism to statically analyze actions without running them.

nine_k• 8 months ago

GitHub has been showing its limitations for quite some time now, and this gives a chance to alternative code forges to rise to prominence.

I hope that Codeberg will become more mainstream for FOSS projects.

I hope another competent player, beside GitLab and Bitbucket, will emerge in the corporate paid space.

timwis• 8 months ago

Really compelling article! What do folks use instead in 2025?

alex-ross• 8 months ago

The lack of lockfiles is wild. Every other package manager figured this out years ago.

Has anyone been bitten by a breaking change from an action update mid-pipeline?

naikrovek• 8 months ago

Mid-pipeline? No, but midday, oh yeah.

michaelmior• 8 months ago

You trust GitHub to give you the right code for a SHA.

The vast majority of users use GitHub-hosted runners. If you don't trust GitHub, you have bigger problems than whether the correct code for an action is downloaded.

gwbas1c2• 8 months ago

I assume that git (not Github) verifies that, if you checkout a hash, the contents of the commit match the hash.

Anyway, software is so complicated that at some level, you need to trust something because it's impossible to personally comprehend and audit all code.

So, you still need to trust git. You still need to trust your OS. You still need to trust the hardware. You just don't have enough minutes in your life to go down through all those levels and understand it well enough to know that there's nothing malicious in there.

eYrKEC2• 8 months ago

Has anyone used ArgoCD as a CI pipeline?

sharts• 8 months ago

Complaining about GHA is like complaining that dog poop smells.

Like, what did one expect?

rurban2• 8 months ago

I agree that github actions has a horrible syntax and can do much less than travis, appveyor, circle, ... I'd really have to resort to yaml references to do anything elegant. But yaml references aren't elegant at all. But it still is free and vastly outperforms the other free CI's.

I just converted our old parrot travis runners to github actions. There I had constant troubles with travis timeouts of 15m 10 years ago. With the new github actions I can run the full tests (which was not possible with travis) in 3 minutes. About 8x faster hardware.

throwawaypath• 8 months ago

Looks like removing the "meritocracy" doormat, hiring Coraline Ada Ehmke, and changing "master" to "main" paid off in spades!

GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst

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