Very confusing how to use this. I just want to run a single action from a single file

[charlesritchea]

I've read the User Guide intro. and I find the idea of "running every action in .github/workflows" completely insane. I accidentally did this and hit ctrl-c so many time then rebooted my computer. I guess if you have an OSS library project that would make sense. But not for a private monorepo. Anyway, later on it says you can run with -W to run a file, but only if it's on: push. How do I just run an arbitrary action?

[Andy4495]

Have you tried the -j option?

For example, from the jobs available in the act repo itself:

> act -l                                                                                                             ~/Documents/act-error-test/act
INFO[0000] Using docker host 'unix:///var/run/docker.sock', and daemon socket 'unix:///var/run/docker.sock' 
Stage  Job ID      Job name             Workflow name       Workflow file      Events                        
0      lint        lint                 checks              checks.yml         pull_request,workflow_dispatch
0      test-linux  test-linux           checks              checks.yml         pull_request,workflow_dispatch
0      test-host   test-${{matrix.os}}  checks              checks.yml         pull_request,workflow_dispatch
0      snapshot    snapshot             checks              checks.yml         pull_request,workflow_dispatch
0      release     promote              promote             promote.yml        workflow_dispatch,schedule    
0      release     release              release             release.yml        push                          
0      stale       Stale                Close stale issues  stale.yml          schedule                      

Detected multiple jobs with the same job name, use `-W` to specify the path to the specific workflow.

To run the test-linux job, you would enter:

> act -j test-linux