actionlint VS runner-images

Yep, actionlint is great! I've used it successfully both to lint my own workflows, and to lint third-party workflows for (basic) security issues.

Unfortunately, it can't lint actions themselves, only workflows that call actions[1]. This is a substantial deficiency, especially for users (like me) who write and maintain a decent number of actions.

[1]: https://github.com/rhysd/actionlint/issues/46

I recently discovered actionlint and immediately told everyone that would listen about it. And now you are too. Static analysis for github actions, it's been pretty useful.

The first pitfall can be statically detected with actionlint

https://github.com/rhysd/actionlint

$ actionlint oops.yaml

Yeah this is a good option if you'd like something to deploy yourself! You can also build an AMI from GitHub's upstream image definition (https://github.com/actions/runner-images/tree/main/images/ub...) if you'd like it to match what's available in GitHub-hosted Actions.

With Depot, we're moving towards deeper performance optimizations and observability than vanilla GitHub runners - we've integrated the runners with a cache storage cluster for instance, and we're working on deeper integration with the compute platform that we built for distributed container image builds - as well as expanding the types of builds we can process beyond Actions and Docker, for instance.

But different options will be better for different folks, and the `philips-labs` project is good at what it does.

Whoa, there's a lot of stuff in there [1] that gets installed straight from vendors, without pinning content checksums to a value known-good to Github.

I get it, they want to have the latest versions instead of depending on how long Ubuntu (or, worse, Debian) package maintainers take to package stuff into their mainline repositories... but this attack surface is nuts.

[1] https://github.com/actions/runner-images/tree/main/images/ub...

I had a similar experience with ARC (actions-runner-controller).

One of the machines in the fleet failed to sync its clock via NTP. Once a job X got scheduled to it, the runner pod failed authentication due to incorrect clock time, and then the whole ARC system started to behave incorrectly: job X was stuck without runners, until another workflow job Y was created, and then X got run but Y became stuck. There were also other wierd behaviors like this so I eventually rebuilt everything based on VMs and stopped using ARC.

Using VMs also allowed me to support the use of the official runner images [0], which is good for compatibility.

I feel more people would benefit from managed "self-hosted" runners, so I started DimeRun [1] to provide cheaper GHA runners for people who don't have the time/willingness to troubleshoot low-level infra issues.

[0]: https://github.com/actions/runner-images

Reminds me: Still waiting for native ARM support on GitHub Actions https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/5631

Used https://github.com/actions/runner-images to get the packages needed for Ubuntu 22.04 As the packer requires a builder, I used "null" builder to set it as localhost ref: https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/docs/builders/null (It was way difficult to figure it out the 1st time) I had to modify the .pkr.hcl file to pick my provisioners. I could not understand the use of /opt/hostedtoolcache folder (which I did later)