I’m running a Powershell script in a GHA workflow (windows-latest runner) and the output when an error occurs doesn’t seem to show the reason for the failure. All it shows is “##[error]Process completed with exit code 1.”

This is problematic: the script appears to crash at this point and I can’t get output to show.  I’ve also tried to output the failure using try/catch: this stops the script failing, but output statements in the catch block aren’t shown.

I have direct EXE invocations at other points and they show errors; it’s just powershell script invocation that dies without a trace. This makes it very difficult to understand why a script is failing.

Adding step debugging produces more output about invocation, but doesn’t give any extra information about the issue.

For example, a script:

try {
    throw (new-object "Exception" @('foo'))
} catch {
    write-host "caught failure: $_"
}
throw "Failed"

with a YAML:

# This is a basic workflow to help you get started with Actions
name: CI
Controls when the action will run. Triggers the workflow on push or pull request
events but only for the master branch
on:

push:

branches: ['*']
A workflow run is made up of one or more jobs that can run sequentially or in parallel
jobs:
This workflow contains a single job called "build"
build:

# The type of runner that the job will run on

runs-on: windows-latest
# Steps represent a sequence of tasks that will be executed as part of the job
steps:
# Checks-out your repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so your job can access it
- uses: actions/checkout@v2

- name: Fail script
  run: .github/bin/fail-script.ps1

Results in the following output:

caught failure: foo
##[error]Process completed with exit code 1.

In this case, the first exception message is printed out BUT the second isn’t. In my case, where I’m using signtool, or Get-PfxCertificate, it just crashes entirely.

Losing this kind of context means that I’m stumped why my script isn’t working: I can make it work on a number of local machines and environments, but not the GHA runner.