act: .gitignore should be ignored for actions

This is also causing issues with actions/cache@v1 as it has dist/ in it’s .gitignore

I’m having an issue because .env is included in the .gitignore for the project. When running act the environment variables within .env are not getting loaded. Commenting out the .env line in .gitignore and running act seems to resolve the issue, but that means the .env would be committed to source control. ☹️

Having to change this each time that I run act is not great. A flag to ignore the .gitignore would be ideal and solve this issue.

One of the use cases for using act to run workflows is to iterate and debug parts of them more quickly. If I want to fix a problem in the workflow, I don’t necessarily need to do a fresh checkout of my codebase each time. Also, I can run workflows against uncommitted changes to decide whether or not I’m ready to commit. This allows me to move faster.

Some flag to be able to ignore the .gitignore would be awesome.

Still should remain open.

It does…unless you are using a local action, stored in the same repo as your workflow with something like uses: ./.github/my-local-action

In that case, you would want any .gitignore to kick in to ensure you don’t copy in files like node_modules

I like @wagenet idea - only use .gitignore for local actions

Hey @alanb-sony - thanks for the PR! I need some help though understanding the scenario. Why wouldn’t you want a .gitignore to be used within the action? I’m thinking of node_modules for example.

This seems like a bug with the cmake action in which there was a bad gitignore that needed to be fixed.