Putting the obvious facetiousness of this whole endeavor aside, doing something like this would mean that your reliability record is exactly as good as GHA

This doesn't seem particularly interesting. Spinning up environments via PRs is nothing new. This just has a fresh coat of paint. Is it neat to pack everything up into a single unit like this? I don't know, maybe.

The most concerning thing here is that you absolutely should not use GitHub fucking Actions as your control plane. Have you ever debugged actions? It's terrible. Old runs magically disappear. The queue sometimes decides to go for a lunch break. Not to mention GitHub's uptime is atrocious.

I'm sorry (not sorry) but I can't take this seriously at all.

I dig the core concept, because it's what I'm replicating in my own homelab at present sans GHA and with a brief flirtation with Podman over Docker.

Thing is, like others have pointed out, relying solely on GHA is just not a great idea. If you're doing your own self-hosted runners you can effectively debug, then sure, that's not a bad idea necessarily, but using the GitHub runners?

Nope. Sorry, just not something I can trust on the free tier.

That being said, I do like the core concept (deploying the essentials to a plain-jane Debian instance - bare metal or virtual - and just bootstrapping via compose files and some form of push), and I'd like to see it refined more for homelab users, especially if you can guarantee some degree of security best practices with it (e.g., SELinux compatibility and/or auto-deploy tools like Wazuh).

I'll poke at it since I gotta blow away my Debian install anyway (went down a rabbit hole on GPU acceleration and Podman that has left it butchered far more than I would've liked to support), just give folks more options than GHA and focus more on essential services.