actions-runner-controller VS garden

Compare actions-runner-controller vs garden and see what are their differences.

actions-runner-controller

Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners (by actions)

garden

Automation for Kubernetes development and testing. Spin up production-like environments for development, testing, and CI on demand. Use the same configuration and workflows at every step of the process. Speed up your builds and test runs via shared result caching (by garden-io)
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actions-runner-controller garden
31 40
4,132 3,210
3.5% 2.9%
9.0 9.9
3 days ago 8 days ago
Go TypeScript
Apache License 2.0 Mozilla Public License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

actions-runner-controller

Posts with mentions or reviews of actions-runner-controller. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-28.
  • Using Kaniko to Build and Publish container image with Github action on Github Self-hosted Runners
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2024
    To set-up the self-hosted runner, an Action Runner Controller (ARC) and Runner scale sets application will be installed via helm. This post will be using Azure Kubernetes Service and ARC that is officialy maintained by Github. There is another ARC that is maintained by the community. You can follow the discussion where github adopted the ARC project into a full Github product here
  • Show HN: DimeRun v2 – Run GitHub Actions on AWS EC2
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Feb 2024
    Before this we were using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller but that's running on K8s instead of VMs. So along with common limitations of running CI jos in K8s/container, it cannot have exactly the same environment as the official GitHub runners. Maintaining a K8s cluster was also very difficult.
  • Terraform module for scalable GitHub action runners on AWS
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    ARC is great for running GitHub Actions on Kubernetes:

    https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    There are also official Heml charts available for ARC: https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

    I am in the process of setting it up on a cheap Hetzner box. If it works, would be a great deal! You can get a 64 GB RAM box for 35 EUR/mo at server auctions with unlimited traffic. I don't mention CPU or GPU, as typically this isn't a bottleneck for my projects.

    Plus, I can configure cache sharing via host-mounted dir. E.g. pnpm cache can be all in one place, and be locally available to pods via a mounted dir. Same for the Docker image cache. This would speed up CI runs and also reduce network traffic by a huge margin.

    GitHub Actions effectively has no local caching. There's an action for caching, but it uses a blob storage for cache artifacts. Which then gets network fetched, gzip'ed and gunzip'ed each time, and from my experience this has never been a gain for medium to large npm projects, as they have thousands of small .js files in node_modules, and thus takes a long time to compress and decompress. I think npm edge cache servers are already so optimized and fast, that in my experience almost always it's faster to install from npm directly. I even tested this on AWS, where the cache was stored in S3, in the same region as CodeBuild (CI), and direct installs from npm were still faster by about 30%.

    So other than adding more hardware resources, local caching is the only way to significantly speed up GH Actions, from my experience, and thus you must have your runner.

  • Action-runner-controller & Enterprise Git
    4 projects | /r/github | 29 Apr 2023
    Older bugs show setting of enterprise URL ( kubectl set env deploy actions-runner-controller -c manager GITHUB_ENTERPRISE_URL=https:// --namespace actions-runner-system) with and values.yml also shows githubEnterpriseServerURL (https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller/blob/master/charts/actions-runner-controller/README.md ).
    4 projects | /r/github | 29 Apr 2023
    You need to use the steps in the repo instead of the steps on the docs if you're using enterprise server.
  • How to save a fortune with self hosted GitHub runners
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Feb 2023
    GitHub has made it possible to run GitHub Actions using your own self-hosted runners. Thanks to the Actions Runner Controller it is surprisingly easy to run actions in your Kubernetes clusters.
  • How to reduce the cost of GitHub Actions
    7 projects | dev.to | 26 Jan 2023
    Since GitHub official has not provided to deploy a Self-hosted runner on Kubernetes, I used the Actions Runner Controller (ARC) project, This project allows rapid deployment of Self-hosted runners through Runner custom resources.
  • DeepFlow uses Spot Instances to speed up GitHub Action exploration
    3 projects | dev.to | 20 Nov 2022
    K8s Controller: Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runner
  • Configure actions-runner-controller with proxy in private EKS cluster
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Jun 2022
    View on GitHub

garden

Posts with mentions or reviews of garden. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-21.
  • Streamlining CI/CD Pipelines with Code: A Developer's Guide
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2023
    To add to what's already been said: If you think about it, CI pipelines are typically a complete description of how your system is built, tested, and deployed.

    Which is pretty fantastic except for how walled off they are. You can't really re-use these descriptions for e.g. development, they're not vendor agnostic, and they only way to run them is by pushing your code.

    Maybe it's a silly analogy but it's almost like being a web dev that doesn't have a browser and needs to send their code to a friend who can tell them if that font size looks good.

    I think we're way over due for freeing these "blueprints" of our system from the confines of CI and making them portable and flexible. And containers are the technology that's enabling that.

    Full disclaimer (as always): I work at Garden[0] where we're also solving that problem but taking a slightly different approach to Dagger (it's still a DAG). Garden config is declarative and the jobs (we call them actions) have a semantic meaning. You can e.g. have a Build action of type container or a Deploy action of type Helm and Garden will figure out what to do with it.

    [0] https://github.com/garden-io/garden

  • GitHub Actions Are a Problem
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    Yes, there's us over at https://github.com/garden-io/garden! We're big believers in pipelines that run anywhere. I even made a short little video that should give you the gist. [1]

    Some of the short-list of differences: we use YAML for our configuration language, Dagger can use full-fat languages to define its pipelines. Our feature scope is broader: you can use us to vend IDP-like stacks to your developers if you're a Platform Team; we make development with remote Kubernetes clusters very easy, including all the remote image builds; and we have a number of integrations so you can bring your IaC tool of choice (Pulumi, Terraform) into your pipeline and set up service -> infra dependencies.

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnan6s2cDg

  • The Icelandic Saga Database
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jun 2023
    Me too. In fact Garden (dev tooling for the Kubernetes)[0] is a Berlin start-up with three Icelandic founders.

    And if I'm not mistaken, two of us worked briefly with @halldorel (above commenter) at an earlier Icelandic start-up. It's a small world (if you're Icelandic).

    [0] https://garden.io

  • Local development set up for microservices with Kubernetes - Skaffold
    3 projects | /r/kubernetes | 31 May 2023
    There are dedicated tools just for that. Apart from skaffold check also tilt.dev, garden.io, devspace.sh, okteto.com
  • Best way to run k8s apps locally
    2 projects | /r/devops | 28 Dec 2022
    Telepresence, tilt, garden.io, okteto, skaffold etc.
  • Local Development with hot reloading, what does your team do?
    7 projects | /r/kubernetes | 14 Dec 2022
    - https://garden.io/
  • Fast file synchronization and network forwarding for remote development
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Oct 2022
  • Deciding between Telepresence vs Garden.io
    3 projects | /r/devops | 25 Jul 2022
    I just used garden.io for a small personal project that was more about figuring out how to use garden. I started with the examples and used the Terraform GKE example.
  • Should devs manage dev environments
    4 projects | /r/ExperiencedDevs | 8 May 2022
    A few other people in the space: garden and tilt have been around for awhile. Skaffold has also been around awhile, but I think it's a step below the others. Or at least it was back when I was evaluating.
  • Mutagen – Cloud-based development using your local tools
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Apr 2022
    We use Mutagen for Garden's hot reloading mechanism. (Garden is a dev tool for K8s and hot reloading enables users to sync changes directly to a prod like dev environment as opposed to doing a rebuild and re-deploy).

    It's a really a fantastic piece of technology and completely transformed the whole experience (we were using good 'ol rsync before). In particular it works seamlessly across platforms.

    If anyone's interested in how we use it, it's here: https://github.com/garden-io/garden/blob/master/core/src/plu...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing actions-runner-controller and garden you can also consider the following projects:

okteto - Develop your applications directly in your Kubernetes Cluster

skaffold - Easy and Repeatable Kubernetes Development

telepresence - Local development against a remote Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster

helm-charts - Jenkins helm charts

turnstyle - 🎟️A GitHub Action for serializing workflow runs

wsl-vpnkit - Provides network connectivity to WSL 2 when blocked by VPN

cache - Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions

tilt-extensions - Extensions for Tilt

UTM - Virtual machines for iOS and macOS

tilt - Define your dev environment as code. For microservice apps on Kubernetes.

waypoint - A tool to build, deploy, and release any application on any platform.

azure-pipelines-agent - Azure Pipelines Agent 🚀