Turborepo: don’t buffer logs on GitHub Actions

When using turbo run inside a GitHub workflow, Turborepo buffers the logs by package so it’s all neatly sorted in the output.

This is a nice feature when you’re looking at the logs after a run is completed.

However when you’re trying to debug a timing-based issue live, this makes it really annoying because the logs are buffered the entire time the process runs and only spit out at the end! And then we can’t see which package logged what first because the logs got grouped by package instead of being in a merged stream.

I ended up dissecting the source of Turborepo to figure out what causes this behavior inside GitHub Actions. I found it.

It’s triggered by the GITHUB_ACTIONS environment variable being present.

So running unset GITHUB_ACTIONS before running turbo run turns off this behavior!

In theory that should suffice but I had the following in my notes so I’ll also leave it here in case it helps:

unset $(env | grep RUNNER | cut -d= -f1)
unset $(env | grep GITHUB | cut -d= -f1)