Spoiler: I made a free and open-source way to get an interactive web terminal to your GitHub Action when it fails. Try it out here: https://actions-term.gripdev.xyz/ (code 🔗)
Your browser does not support the video element.
Building it
I think we’ve all been there, your build fails in Actions, but the script works fine locally. You now settle into a slow loop of:
Push speculative change See if it worked
It was in the middle of one of these when I started thinking about how to make it better.
A Terminal would be great, that’s obvious, but how to make it happen? How could I make it free, and open to anyone, without costing me lots of money?
Operating a service that forward traffic between a user and the Actions VM would stack up data transfer costs and take some work to scale.
What about a Peer-to-Peer connection? I’d recently been going deeper on how Tailscale, iroh and WebRTC use UDP Hole Punching to create Peer-to-Peer (P2P) connections between nodes without relaying traffic.
If that worked then my server would only need to exchange a tiny bit of information per session and hopefully cost me very little 🤞
... continue reading