act
A command-line tool that runs a project's GitHub Actions workflows locally using Docker, so changes can be tested without pushing to GitHub.
act runs GitHub Actions workflows locally instead of requiring a commit and push to test changes to files in .github/workflows. It reads the workflow files, works out which actions need to run, and uses the Docker API to pull or build the images the workflow's steps depend on, following the dependency order defined in the workflow.
Environment variables and the filesystem are configured to match what GitHub Actions provides, so a workflow behaves the same locally as it would in GitHub's own runners. Because workflows can already describe a sequence of steps, act can also be used as a local task runner in place of a Makefile, letting a team reuse action definitions instead of duplicating them.
The project is written in Go and is available as a GitHub Local Actions extension for Visual Studio Code.