Self-hosted runners

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How to set up GitHub Action runners on self-hosted infrastructure

This repository explains how to set up a server for running continuous integration tests on other hardware than what GitHub provides. This can be useful when the code you want to test has special requirements, for example if

• it needs a GPU to run (CUDA installation with ansible instructions)
• it needs multiple nodes
• testing requires data that needs to stay on-premises for privacy reasons or legal reasons
• testing requires data that is too big to move
• testing requires specific software

This guide distinguishes between the client and the server; the client is your own machine; the server is whichever machine runs the tests. For either side, we'll explain what configuration needs to be done. For people who just want to try out the instructions but don't have access to remote hardware, we included a few alternatives for running the server locally as well, through the use of virtualization (with VirtualBox) and containerization (with Docker).

For the client, we included instructions for Linux Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows; the server-side instructions all assume Linux Ubuntu.

| Status | Client OS | Server hardware | Runner | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | :heavycheckmark: Completed | Linux Ubuntu | local machine via Docker | link | | :heavycheckmark: Completed | Linux Ubuntu | local machine via Singularity | link | | :heavycheckmark: Completed | Linux Ubuntu | local machine via Vagrant | link | | :heavycheckmark: Completed | Linux Ubuntu | local machine via VirtualBox | link | | :heavycheckmark: Completed | Linux Ubuntu | remote machine at SURF HPC Cloud | link | | :hourglassflowingsand: WIP | Mac | local machine via Docker | - | | :hourglassflowingsand: WIP | Mac | local machine via Vagrant | - | | :hourglassflowingsand: WIP | Mac | local machine via VirtualBox | - | | :hourglassflowingsand: WIP | Mac | remote machine at SURF HPC Cloud | - | | :hourglassflowingsand: WIP | Windows | local machine via Docker | - | | :heavycheckmark: Completed | Windows | local machine via Vagrant | link | | :hourglassflowingsand: WIP | Windows | local machine via VirtualBox | - | | :heavycheckmark: Completed | Windows | remote machine at SURF HPC Cloud | link |

Security

A warning from GitHub for self-hosted runners in combination with public repositories is shown here. Please take this seriously. It basically means that the combination of a self-hosted runner and a public GitHub repository is unsafe. However, there was a recent discussion indicating that GitHub may add features to make this combination safe in the near future.

Documentation for developers

If you want to check if the links in your markdown work, install markdown-link-check

shell npm install

then run

shell find . -name '*.md' -not -path './node_modules/*' -exec markdown-link-check '{}' --config .mlc-config.json ';'