About self-hosted runners - GitHub Docs (original) (raw)
You can host your own runners and customize the environment used to run jobs in your GitHub Actions workflows.
About self-hosted runners
A self-hosted runner is a system that you deploy and manage to execute jobs from GitHub Actions on GitHub.
Self-hosted runners:
- Give you more control of hardware, operating system, and software tools than GitHub-hosted runners provide.
- Are free to use with GitHub Actions, but you are responsible for the cost of maintaining your runner machines.
- Let you create custom hardware configurations that meet your needs with processing power or memory to run larger jobs, install software available on your local network.
- Receive automatic updates for the self-hosted runner application only, though you may disable automatic updates of the runner.
- Can use cloud services or local machines that you already pay for.
- Don't need to have a clean instance for every job execution.
- Can be physical, virtual, in a container, on-premises, or in a cloud.
You can use self-hosted runners anywhere in the management hierarchy. Repository-level runners are dedicated to a single repository, while organization-level runners can process jobs for multiple repositories in an organization. Organization owners can choose which repositories are allowed to create repository-level self-hosted runners. See Disabling or limiting GitHub Actions for your organization. Finally, enterprise-level runners can be assigned to multiple organizations in an enterprise account.
Requirements for self-hosted runner machines
You can use any machine as a self-hosted runner as long at it meets these requirements:
- You can install and run the self-hosted runner application on the machine.
- The machine can communicate with GitHub Actions.
- The machine has enough hardware resources for the type of workflows you plan to run. The self-hosted runner application itself only requires minimal resources.
- If you want to run workflows that use Docker container actions or service containers, you must use a Linux machine and Docker must be installed.