I think it does what I want when I manually specify each image in the invocation. ie

act -P ubuntu-22.04=catthehacker/ubuntu:full-22.04 -P ubuntu-latest=catthehacker/ubuntu:full-latest -P ubuntu-20.04=catthehacker/ubuntu:full-20.04

Is there a way to make this the default?

There are multiple locations where you can change default cli flags, a good point would be to add it to the act userguide

• ./.actrc For project specfic settings
• ~/.actrc For global settings (default location of old versions of act, ~ is your userprofile/home folder)
• %localappdata%/act/actrc (Windows, Don't remember 100%ly)
• ~/Library/Preferences/act/actrc (macOS, A guess, not tested yet)
• ~/.config/act/actrc (macOS, A guess, not tested yet)
  More here https://github.com/adrg/xdg config path subpath is act/actrc

The content for your preference would be added to a actrc file like

-P ubuntu-22.04=catthehacker/ubuntu:full-22.04
-P ubuntu-latest=catthehacker/ubuntu:full-latest
-P ubuntu-20.04=catthehacker/ubuntu:full-20.04

The format of this file is just -flag + + argument + newline (don't use any kind of quotes)

We should really make act log all actrc locations if not already.

If you would provide act -P image=catthehacker/ubuntu:full-22.04 -v then you might even see which actrc is loaded in the log, delete it to get the survey again.

On macOS, the config I selected on first run seems to have been saved to ~/Library/Application Support/act/actrc which I was able to identify from perusing the base directories here: https://github.com/adrg/xdg?tab=readme-ov-file#xdg-base-directory

However, this took me a long time to find, as the output of act after selecting an option includes a dead link and only mentions ~/.actrc and nothing about XDG directory structures:

Default image and other options can be changed manually in ~/.actrc (please refer to https://github.com/nektos/act#configuration for additional information about file structure)

If I can get things up and running I'll try to submit a PR to update the documentation.

On macOS, the config I selected on first run seems to have been saved to ~/Library/Application Support/act/actrc

Thanks @mitchellnemitz, I'd been digging around for it with no luck!

for macOS deleting actrc at /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/act gets the work done.

for macOS deleting actrc at /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/act gets the work done.

It worked thanks.
It would be great to have a setting command for changing this.

for macOS deleting actrc at /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/act gets the work done.

It worked thanks. It would be great to have a setting command for changing this.

i'll try to raise a pr, you can also if you want to :)

I found actrc at %LocalAppData%/act/actrc on Windows

I found actrc at ./.config/act/actrc on Ubuntu.

for macOS deleting actrc at /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/act gets the work done.

rm /Users/$USER/Library/Application\ Support/act/actrc

Using environment variable also work like that.

Had the same issue here. Where is the source code for the book located?

If - like me - you're running act as sudo (because docker needs sudo on my system), the file to remove/edit is /root/.config/act/actrc.