alt Hacker NewsGitHub Actions runners are hard to self-host.
The runner configuration and registration process is unnecessarily byzantine. [1]
They can't cancel jobs cleanly. [2]
There are consistency problems everywhere. [3]
Their own documentations describes horrible things unless you use runners in JIT mode. Though JIT runners are not always removed after exit.
If there is a worse self-hosted CI runner, I haven't yet met it.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/manage-runners/se...
Replies
Yet it works perfectly which forgejo/gitea (uses the act runner)
And they are even on their third (fourth?) from-scratch rewrite of their agent server. When will they get it right? (Rhetorical question)
I am developing a self-hosted solution for this [1]. It’s true that it’s somewhat of a pain but JIT runners allow a lot of flexibility that we don’t find elsewhere.
And if you want any concurrency at all, you need 1 runner registration per concurrent job. And each runner needs its own user. And each runner requires a full and separate copy of the runner software, which is large (hundreds of megs) and self-updates.