Have folks had good success with using this? For me it was extremely slow and it was far faster to just push a branch to github and test.

For me act works fairly well, though it isn't exactly the same as Github. Matrix builds didn't work properly (just noticed it has been fixed now), and the base images aren't quite the same.

Github should send a bunch of money to the act developer - I know I wouldn't have used Github actions at all without act existing, I'm sure other people must be in the same situation. (Though I'm not paying Github either, so perhaps I'm not a target customer...)

Like many things, the more complex the workflow the more useful it becomes running it locally.

I've found it especially useful for fixing complex workflows or working with custom actions. It's not strictly needed, but it does speed up your workflow once you figure out the kinks.

And for gitlab pipelines:

https://stackoverflow.com/q/32933174

Unfortunately, it only supports running single jobs. More complex tasks that requires dependencies, variables, job creation context (MR, Trigger, Web, etc.) can't be tested.

Then maybe this?

https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local

(I only tried it shortly many months ago before running into some issues, it probably works better now)

GitHub also has a tool that will covert Jenkins pipelines (and other tooling) to Actions called Valet.

https://github.com/github/gh-valet

That's pretty cool. I could have used something like that for Microsoft's CI.

It should very much concern you that this is a third-party tool with zero support from GitHub. There is no first-party solution.

Ha, that's great, I am definitely trying it. Thank you.

hm you can just run self-hosted github action runners for free...