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Show HN: Preloop – GitHub Actions locally in microvms and SSH/pause failures

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Screenshot of Show HN: Preloop – GitHub Actions locally in microvms and SSH/pause failures

Preloop is a local, self-hosted implementation of GitHub Actions that runs existing workflows unmodified and exposes the official actions/runner protocol so the real runner can register and execute jobs unchanged. It supports the same workflow features (expressions, matrix builds, reusable workflows, concurrency groups, OIDC), can run against uncommitted or .gitignored changes, and offers a lightweight Rust runner alternative that is much smaller and uses far less peak memory. Jobs run inside hardware-isolated microVMs forked from a recorded "golden" image in about 300 ms, with elastic memory usage and a control plane that idles at very low RSS. Releases include platform binaries and CycloneDX SBOMs with checksums.

Operationally, installation can be done via Homebrew, npm, or a provided installer and a guided preloop init produces a local config and golden VM; the official runner image is large (≈9 GB compressed, ≈50 GB unpacked) so ~80 GB disk is recommended. A webhook watchdog reconciles events against the GitHub API and can open draft PRs with correct checks. Developer-focused features include DAP-powered live inspection (attach, pause, inspect job/secret/context), step-level retries, and the ability to fix code in another pane then :sync + :retry to continue without rerunning the whole workflow. Notable current limitations include Docker-action issues on Apple Silicon via Rosetta.

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