Run your spec directly in CI / Github Action

If you are unable to reproduce the error locally - try running your spec directly in CI. Github Actions and CI in general aren’t designed to allow you to SSH into them, but you can still do that with a couple of changes:

  1. Force it to stay “alive”
  2. Allow it to accept incoming connection with upterm or ngrok 1

Upterm Github Action

The Upterm Github Action does both of these things for you:

- name: Setup upterm session
  uses: lhotari/action-upterm@v1
  if: failure()
  with:
    wait-timeout-minutes: 30

If your specs fail, this sets up upterm + tmux and provides an SSH connection string and force the container to stay alive for 30 minutes. To connect, watch your the build log untill you see:

=== F8S2LCNHYCL8S3WGMW72                                                                                                 
Command:                tmux new -s upterm -x 132 -y 43                                                                 
Force Command:          tmux attach -t upterm                                                                           
Host:                   ssh://uptermd.upterm.dev:22                                                                     
SSH Session:            ssh F8S2LCn..........<REDACTED>...............FsOjIyMjI=@uptermd.upterm.dev

Then you can connect by copying the ssh connection string, and run your tests directly on the Github Action container:

upterm

  1. For upterm, you can run your own uptermd
  2. Configure Github Actions to run on your own containers (via AWS/EC2 or similar), then connect directly

  1. Upterm & ngrok require proxying through an uptermd server or the ngrok equivalent, which is available for free. However if this is unacceptable you have other options: ↩