Debug your GitHub Actions by using tmate

This GitHub Action offers you a direct way to interact with the host system on which the actual scripts (Actions) will run.

Features

• Debug your GitHub Actions by using SSH or Web shell
• Continue your Workflows afterwards

Supported Operating Systems

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows

Getting Started

By using this minimal example a tmate session will be created.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/[email protected]
    - name: Setup tmate session
      uses: mxschmitt/[email protected]

To get the connection string, just open the Checks tab in your Pull Request and scroll to the bottom. There you can connect either directly per SSH or via a web based terminal.

Without sudo

By default we run the commands using sudo. If you get sudo: not found you can use the parameter below to execute the commands directly.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/[email protected]
    - name: Setup tmate session
      uses: mxschmitt/[email protected]
      with:
        sudo: false

Timeout

By default the tmate session will remain open until the workflow times out. You can specify your own timeout in minutes if you wish to reduce GitHub Actions usage.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/[email protected]
    - name: Setup tmate session
      uses: mxschmitt/[email protected]
      timeout-minutes: 15

Only on failure

By default a failed step will cause all following steps to be skipped. You can specify that the tmate session only starts if a previous step failed.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/[email protected]
    - name: Setup tmate session
      if: ${{ failure() }}
      uses: mxschmitt/[email protected]

Use registered public SSH key(s)

By default anybody can connect to the tmate session. You can opt-in to install the public SSH keys that you have registered with your GitHub profile.

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/[email protected]
    - name: Setup tmate session
      uses: mxschmitt/[email protected]
      with:
        limit-access-to-actor: true

If the registered public SSH key is not your default private SSH key, you will need to specify the path manually, like so: ssh -i <path-to-key> <tmate-connection-string>.

Continue a workflow

If you want to continue a workflow and you are inside a tmate session, just create a empty file with the name continue either in the root directory or in the project directory by running touch continue or sudo touch /continue.

Connection string / URL is not visible

The connection string will be written in the logs every 5 seconds. For more information checkout issue #1.