Been dealing with this more often lately. Tests pass on my machine, I push, and CI blows up. Usually it’s one of these:
- Different Node/Python/whatever version
- Missing env vars that exist in my .env but not in CI secrets
- File system case sensitivity (macOS vs Linux)
- Some flaky test that depends on timing
My current debugging flow is pretty basic: check the logs, compare versions, run the exact same Docker image locally if I can. But it still eats 20-30 minutes each time before I figure out the actual problem.
Anyone have a more systematic approach? Like a quick checklist you run through before you even look at the logs?
Also curious — do you replicate your CI environment locally with something like act (for GitHub Actions) or just trust the remote runner?
Whatever the logs indicate is the issue? How can there be a fixed response to this?
You should definitely use your builder container to run your tests locally before pushing changes though. That’s one of the advantages of containers - a consistent environment.