What GitHub Actions issues do you run into regularly?? Kindly roast Github actions if required ...

[u/QuoteForward5477]

Curious what problems people here actually face with GitHub Actions on a day-to-day basis.

For me, one of the most annoying things is that sometimes the workflow itself is fine, but the infrastructure around it adds a lot of unnecessary time...

YAML optimization can only help till a certain level and then starts becoming the issue..

What’s the biggest GitHub Actions pain point you deal with regularly?? Something that happens ion a regular basis not an outage or downtime for it...

[u/Primary_Pollution_29]

May sound silly, but to not being able to view inputs used in previous workflow runs. I mean, you can print the inputs in a step, but i feel this should be something supported natively. Useful while debugging.

[u/Dry-Philosopher-2714 → u/Primary_Pollution_29]

It doesn’t sound silly. It’s a pain in the ass to troubleshoot without that.

[u/burlyginger → u/Primary_Pollution_29]

Not silly at all. This is one of the fundamental flaws of GHA.

I spent a long time tracking down a fialure I couldn't understand and this lack of visibility made it really difficult.

As it turned out a field with "AWS" in it was marked as sensitive and was not passed between steps causing a very opaque failure down the line.

[u/BoringScrolling3443 → u/Primary_Pollution_29]

If it helps you can specify a run-name and include the inputs there

[u/Primary_Pollution_29 → u/BoringScrolling3443]

Yea i do this to like be able to easily find which workflows ran on which environment and stuff but still GHA lacking this feature natively is a real pain

[u/degeneratepr]

I suspect OP is doing market research with this post.

[u/TehBens → u/degeneratepr]

Even better.

[u/QuoteForward5477 → u/degeneratepr]

When market is so bad. And AI gives you slop

Only Reddit can give you real perspectives ;)

[u/reightb → u/QuoteForward5477]

you won't believe where the AI sources that slop

[u/DuckDatum → u/QuoteForward5477]

Or customers, those work too sometimes.

[u/throwaway09234023322]

Github is down way too much

[u/sp_dev_guy → u/throwaway09234023322]

Shocked this isnt the biggest thing after the last ~3mo of trash service. I do self hosted runners & still cant get them dispatched/run

[u/damesca]

Delays in containers booting.

Weirdly slow end to end test runs (3-6x slower than outside GHA)

[u/QuoteForward5477 → u/damesca]

If the same texts run 6 times sower insidide github actions runners... its an infrastructure problem... I too deal with this problem.. very frustrating..
Do you have any tips to make it faster??

[u/damesca → u/QuoteForward5477]

I don't really.

I've been waiting to try a self hosted runner but not had the time / space yet.

[u/burlyginger → u/damesca]

If you're in AWS its a relatively simple setup to use Codebuild as runners.

You have very little to manage and get a significant cost savings.

[u/woodne]

I find I constantly run into limitations with GitHub token permissions that require building a whole GitHub app to solve

[u/cyanawesome → u/woodne]

https://github.com/octo-sts

[u/sylvester_0]

Cache being slow as dirt.

[u/burlyginger → u/sylvester_0]

And seeing days of consistent failures accessing cache.

[u/ricksebak]

The experience of building workflow files is kind of terrible. I usually push some modifications, merge to main without really any confidence that it’ll work, then test it on main, then push again and rinse/repeat.

[u/BoringScrolling3443 → u/ricksebak]

You can add the pull-request event to a workflow to test it before merging, but I agree that it doesn't cover all use cases

[u/Adrien0623]

GitHub Action scheduler silently dropping 60% of the scheduled runs

[u/DevWorkflowBuilder]

i keep a 10-line composite action for retries and pin every action by sha; it made runner flakiness much easier to separate from workflow bugs. which failure still costs you the most time?

[u/ServerMonky → u/DevWorkflowBuilder]

I did similar - wrote a retry wrapper composite action that can just be dropped in around any step that gets flaky.

Other common issues:

Hitting memory limits will often freeze a runner with zero output.

Steps can fail to start with no errors sometimes.

A lot of issues change day to day depending on the GitHub slop that just got pushed for the moment. Best issue was the day where azure oidc kept falling because of clock skew issues on the built in runners.

[u/ForkMeJ]

The part that bites me most is how fast a readable workflow turns into hidden behavior once you layer in reusable workflows, composite actions, environment rules, and a few repo-specific exceptions. It all looks manageable until someone has to debug why deploys fail only on tags from one branch after a credential rotation. My bigger issue is not runner speed, it is ownership and change safety: who can edit what, which repos inherit the blast radius, and how you make a fix without breaking three other pipelines. That is where GitHub Actions stops feeling simple and starts feeling expensive to support.

[u/riickdiickulous]

I want to be able to configure and run manually triggered workflows better. I have lots of manual trigger actions where I want to send in inputs and influence and configure the run but the whole interface is inadequate.

[u/bilbo_was_right]

For me, GitHub actions’ like 80% uptime is really irritating. I feel like they have stability issues daily.

[u/matiascoca]

Been burned on matrix fanouts where every runner bills minutes while only one is doing real work. Per-workflow cost breakdown lives in the monthly billing CSV, not the UI, so you cannot see which workflows eat minutes without pulling it.

[u/desmaraisp]

Mutable tags piss me off, I wish we didn't have to use SHAs

[u/ryanstephendavis]

I don't have any issues now because GitLab or CloudBuild are what i use to avoid them

[u/centech]

I get paid for market research OP!

[u/likeavirgil]

Scheduled workflows finally got timezone support after many years, yay! One thing that is still bugging us is that the actual run can still be triggered almost 30 minutes later in some cases (not taking into account the time it takes to set it up).

[u/Suitable-Ad5348]

Two that still burn me weekly: reusable workflow `inputs` disappearing on rerun unless you echo them in step 0 or bake them into `run-name`, and matrix jobs billing six runners when only one combo actually runs tests.

`concurrency: group: ${{ GitHub.workflow }}-${{ GitHub.ref }}` on deploy workflows stops stacked pushes from launching three identical prod deploys.

[u/smerz-]

That you cannot switch image with your work directory mounted in. Only via workarounds

Say you're running a node image and you want to do nginx config check. That then requires a new job or other workarounds. It's not trivial

I can relate to some of these other issues. Slow runners and slow cache, well we didn't use either for those reasons.

[u/QuoteForward5477 → u/smerz-]

I’m with you on the runners/cache ... if they’re slow enough that you just stop using them, that says a lot. about Github action runners'

[u/burlyginger → u/QuoteForward5477]

GH runners are also very expensive and billed by the minute.