act runner

[Mohammad-Alqadi]

hey there
I'm not sure if i have missed something, but i downloaded act and start working on it and everything went good
But i'm not able to see the container the act works on.
I have deleted all the containers and the images i have locally just to force act to rebuild everything over again but it didn't mind it at all and worked again so fast like nothing happened.
also i use one step on the workflow to write some content into file, i was trying to find where this file is but i couldn't

Just to make sure that i'm getting this right
Where the (runners/docker containers) of act are?
does act run on some global containers? (is my repo safe?)

[Antvirf]

On observing (running) act containers

If you start a flow with act (and assuming it is still running), you should be able to see the container with docker ps. Once it's finished, it will be deleted though. (If on linux you may need to prefix docker commands with sudo depending on your setup.)

For example, if I just started a flow, I can see it with:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                           COMMAND                  CREATED         STATUS        PORTS     NAMES
fe9ece598cdf   catthehacker/ubuntu:act-20.04   "/usr/bin/tail -f /d…"   2 seconds ago   Up 1 second             name-of-the-thing-you-are-working-on

On where the runners are

They should be visible with docker image ls, just like any other image.

$ docker image ls
REPOSITORY                                                TAG                                                                          IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
catthehacker/ubuntu                                       act-20.04                                                                    cf0a225bbc9e   3 days ago      1.14GB
catthehacker/ubuntu                                       act-latest                                                                   a6a1365ccd00   10 days ago     1.14GB

If you remove an image, then it will need to pull it again when it runs. For example, I have a workflow with ubuntu-18.04 and I deleted it - when I try to run that flow:

$ act   
[Test dual-trigger workflow/test_dual_trigger] 🚀  Start image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-18.04
[Test dual-trigger workflow/test_dual_trigger]   🐳  docker pull image=catthehacker/ubuntu:act-18.04 platform= username= forcePull=false
...

On where the containers run

They run on your local machine, so in that sense your repo is 'safe' (i.e. it is not running in someone else's computer).

On writing to files

If you e.g. echo "hello" > output.txt in your workflow to create a text file, it will be done inside the running container. The container is deleted on exit so you don't see the file.

You could use the bind flag to act, which binds your working directory to the container rather than copying it. To use the example from above:

# act without bind - just shows README in my example project
$ act
...
$ ls
> README.md


# act with bind - shows that a file created inside the action is saved
$ act --bind
...
$ ls
> README.md	output.txt

If you are getting different outputs/results to these examples, it would be great if you can post some of the commands you are using and more info about your setup :)

[Mohammad-Alqadi]

good day antvirf, i would first thank you for the explanation but i followed what you just mentioned and still i couldn't see the imagine neither the container:
Im using: act --verbose --reuse --bind --secret-file .env -W "./.github_locally"

The bind flag works fine, what confuses me the most the i have purge all the data of docker and still every time it feels like i caches everything.

[Antvirf]

Could you post the same output but also add your final act run command? Could then see in then output if it is actually pulling or using a cached image to try and answer that part.

Also, I'm not sure if in your example screenshot you had triggered a workflow already? Or whether the screenshot was just a snapshot on your machine without any workflows running?

[Mohammad-Alqadi]

The workflow was triggered successfully and the act works perfectly fine like exactly how i want it to be, the only problem im facing is that im not seeing any container nor the image the act uses.

[Mohammad-Alqadi]

Thank you Antvirf, i figure it out.
silly me i just had to add sudo.