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\u26a0\ufe0f 17 Feb 2022: There have been reports of running tmate causing account suspensions. See this issue for details. Continue with caution.
Thanks to this Twitter conversation I found out about mxschmitt/action-tmate, which uses https://tmate.io/ to open an interactive shell session running inside the GitHub Actions environment.
\nI created a .github/workflows/tmate.yml file in my repo containing the following:
name: tmate session\n\non:\n workflow_dispatch:\n\njobs:\n build:\n runs-on: ubuntu-latest\n steps:\n - uses: actions/checkout@v2\n - name: Setup tmate session\n uses: mxschmitt/action-tmate@v3Clicking the \"Run workflow\" button in the GitHub Actions interface then gave me the following in the GitHub Actions log output:
\nWebURL: https://tmate.io/t/JA69KaB2avRPRZSkRb8JPa9Gd\n\nSSH: ssh JA69KaB2avRPRZSkRb8JPa9Gd@nyc1.tmate.io\nI ran ssh JA69KaB2avRPRZSkRb8JPa9Gd@nyc1.tmate.io and got a direction connection to the Action, with my project files all available thanks to the - uses: actions/checkout@v2 step.
Once I'd finish testing things out in that environment, I typed touch continue and the session ended itself.
I had a tricky test failure that I wanted to debug interactively. Here's a recipe for starting a tmate shell ONLY if the previous step failed, and only if the run was triggered manually (using workflow_dispatch) - because I don't want an accidental test opening up a shell and burning up my GitHub Actions minutes allowance.
steps:\n - name: Run tests\n run: pytest\n - name: tmate session if tests fail\n if: failure() && github.event_name == 'workflow_dispatch'\n uses: mxschmitt/action-tmate@v3