Inconsistent behavior: sometimes runs fail, then succeed on retry

[julie-nga]

Hello, I'm testing locally with act on the drakvuf repository. The workflow file is located here. In that file, I modified the cognitive-complexity job to run on an ubuntu-22.04.

When running act -j cognitive-complexity multiple times in a row, the command sometimes fails with errors like an invalid reference format or an unsupported plateform. And then running the exact same command again often succeeds without changes.

Example screenshots:

Is this instability expected behavior when using act locally? Could it be due to the Docker setup or a misconfiguration in the workflow?

[kitt159]

I got the same error with

strategy:
  matrix:
    runner: [ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-latest]

in my workflow. Even though act correctly skips windows-latest and macos-latest. But when I change it to

strategy:
  matrix:
    runner: [ubuntu-latest]

it seems to work correctly.

edit: Works even with sequential running like this: act --matrix runner:ubuntu-latest act --matrix runner:windows-latest (skipped) act --matrix runner:macos-latest (skipped)

[DaanSelen]

I got the same error with

I have the same with matrix and a couple rather large steps;

[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-1] GoGitActionCache fetch https://github.com/docker/login-action with ref v3 at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git resolved to 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-1] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'action.yml' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-1] GoGitActionCache fetch https://github.com/docker/metadata-action with ref master at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-metadata-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4] GoGitActionCache fetch https://github.com/docker/login-action with ref v3 at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git resolved to 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'action.yml' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'action.yaml' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'Dockerfile' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2] GoGitActionCache fetch https://github.com/docker/login-action with ref v3 at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git resolved to 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'action.yml' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4] failed to read 'action.yml' from action 'Log in to the Container registry' with path '' of step: file does not exist
failed to read 'action.yaml' from action 'Log in to the Container registry' with path '' of step: file does not exist
failed to read 'Dockerfile' from action 'Log in to the Container registry' with path '' of step: file does not exist
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'action.yaml' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4] ⭐ Run Complete job
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-3] GoGitActionCache fetch https://github.com/docker/login-action with ref v3 at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git resolved to 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-3] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'action.yml' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-3] GoGitActionCache fetch https://github.com/docker/metadata-action with ref master at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-metadata-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4]   ✅  Success - Complete job
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-4] 🏁  Job failed
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2] GoGitActionCache get content docker/login-action with sha 184bdaa0721073962dff0199f1fb9940f07167d1 subpath 'Dockerfile' at /home/dselen/.cache/act/docker-login-action.git
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2] failed to read 'action.yml' from action 'Log in to the Container registry' with path '' of step: file does not exist
failed to read 'action.yaml' from action 'Log in to the Container registry' with path '' of step: file does not exist
failed to read 'Dockerfile' from action 'Log in to the Container registry' with path '' of step: file does not exist
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2] ⭐ Run Complete job
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2]   ✅  Success - Complete job
[Docker-Builder/Build Docker Images-2] 🏁  Job failed

A rather random action step fails.