Cake offers the option to do a dry run of the build script by passing the --dry-run argument to the Cake executable.

It should be possible to do the same from a GitHub Actions workflow by setting the dry-run input parameter to true:

steps:
  - name: Run the Cake script
    uses: cake-build/cake-action@v1
    with:
      dry-run: true

Of course, the default value should be false.