alt Hacker NewsA lot of the pain of GitHub Actions gets much better using tools like action-tmate: https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate
As soon as I need more than two tries to get some workflow working, I set up a tmate session and debug things using a proper remote shell. It doesn't solve all the pain points, but it makes things a lot better.
Tmate is not available anymore, and will be fully decommissioned[0]. Use upterm[1] and action-upterm[2] instead.
Honestly, this should be built into GitHub Actions.
[0] https://github.com/tmate-io/tmate/issues/322
[1] https://upterm.dev/
[2] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debug-with-ssh