The act workflow suggested in the contribution guide doesn't work well

[abdulowork]

I was trying to run the CI builds locally, but I encountered some issues. I suspect these are just act bugs, but I am not an experienced act user, so I may have missed some configuration. I hope it makes sense to mention these issues explicitly in the swift-java repository because the contribution guide calls for act usage.

It seems most useful commands explode due to a missing node binary. For example:

act workflow_call -W .github/workflows/pull_request.yml -j benchmark-java --container-architecture=linux/amd64

fails for me with:

| OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: unable to start container process: exec: "node": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown

The workaround was to add a step (e.g. here) with an explicit node installation:

      - name: Install node
        if: ${{ env.ACT }}
        run: apt update && apt install -y curl && curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_22.x | bash && apt install -y nodejs

after that act started failin here with:

❗ ::error::Input required and not supplied: distribution

I didn't find a workaround, so I had to hardcode the distribution value.

Finally, the Swift compilation still fails in the benchmark-java flow; it's a different failure each time, and I am still trying to understand the root cause.

Perhaps the contribution guide and the .github files could be updated with some swift-java specific recommendations for running act?

[abdulowork]

I am still trying to understand the root cause

It seems that with the arm linux image I can get to a successful build; perhaps the amd64 image was the reason behind the strange compilation failures