runner VS actions-runner-controller

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

runner

The Runner for GitHub Actions :rocket: (by actions)

actions-runner-controller

Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners (by actions)
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runner actions-runner-controller
58 31
4,423 4,132
3.0% 3.5%
9.1 9.0
5 days ago 3 days ago
C# Go
MIT License Apache 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.

runner

Posts with mentions or reviews of runner. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-23.
  • Why the fuck are we templating YAML? (2019)
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    In the case of GitHub Actions, it's made more painful by the lack of support for YAML anchors, which provide a bare minimum of composability.

    https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182

  • GitHub Actions Are a Problem
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    The runner is open source, but once you read the code you'd wish it wasn't.

    https://github.com/actions/runner

    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    You can also find many leftovers with the "VSS" acronym, like https://github.com/actions/runner/blob/main/src/Sdk/Common/C... or https://github.com/actions/runner/blob/main/src/Sdk/Common/C... - which also mentions TFS (which is yet another acronym that used to refer to the Microsoft team-development thing).
  • DevOps CI/CD Quick Start Guide with GitHub Actions 🛠️🐙⚡️
    4 projects | dev.to | 27 Oct 2023
    $ mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner $ curl -o actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.311.0/actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 100 98.1M 100 98.1M 0 0 20.0M 0 0:00:04 0:00:04 --:--:-- 23.5M $ echo "fa2f107dbce709807bae014fb3121f5dbe106211b6bbe3484c41e3b30828d6b2 actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz" | shasum -a 256 -c actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz: OK $ tar xzf ./actions-runner-osx-arm64-2.311.0.tar.gz ❯ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/dpills/devops-quick-start-guide --token AGDCRGCMZWN34QIVISIO5XXXXXX -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | | / ___(_) |_| | | |_ _| |__ / \ ___| |_(_) ___ _ __ ___ | | | | _| | __| |_| | | | | '_ \ / _ \ / __| __| |/ _ \| '_ \/ __| | | | |_| | | |_| _ | |_| | |_) | / ___ \ (__| |_| | (_) | | | \__ \ | | \____|_|\__|_| |_|\__,_|_.__/ /_/ \_\___|\__|_|\___/|_| |_|___/ | | | | Self-hosted runner registration | | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Authentication √ Connected to GitHub # Runner Registration Enter the name of the runner group to add this runner to: [press Enter for Default] Enter the name of runner: [press Enter for dpills-mac] This runner will have the following labels: 'self-hosted', 'macOS', 'ARM64' Enter any additional labels (ex. label-1,label-2): [press Enter to skip] √ Runner successfully added √ Runner connection is good # Runner settings Enter name of work folder: [press Enter for _work] √ Settings Saved. ❯ ./run.sh √ Connected to GitHub Current runner version: '2.311.0' 2023-10-27 13:32:16Z: Listening for Jobs
  • Automate Flutter app delivery to AppCenter with GitHub Actions
    7 projects | dev.to | 6 Oct 2023
    A runner is where your action's jobs will be run. It can be a hosted virtual environment, or you can self-host a runner in your machine.
  • How to deal with MSVC in DevOps
    9 projects | /r/cpp | 6 Jul 2023
    If i understand this writing correctly (https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/904), running Windows containers in a windows-latest GH Actions host is not possible. While using a self-hosted runner on a Windows server might be an option, this is not what I want since it is a package repo for a well-known open source project, think of the package repo part as a mini-Conan. I wouldn't know who would want to host that. In the best case we would stay with just GH Actions to keep everything confined in one space :)
  • Why is GitHub Actions installing Go 1.2 when I specify Go 1.20?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 May 2023
    Shameless plug for cuelang, which, among many other things, avoid this problem:

    https://cuelang.org

    It's not a new issue, the Python community had exactly the same surprise with 3.10: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1989

  • Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Apr 2023
    C# is used for Actions: https://github.com/actions/runner, and Go is used a lot for internal services. There is no traction rewriting our monolith in C#.
  • Raspberry Pi como runner do GitHub Action
    3 projects | dev.to | 13 Mar 2023
    # Create a folder $ mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner # Download the latest runner package $ curl -o actions-runner-linux-arm64-2.302.1.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.302.1/actions-runner-linux-arm64-2.302.1.tar.gz # Extract the installer $ tar xzf ./actions-runner-linux-arm64-2.302.1.tar.gz

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

What are some alternatives?

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

helm-charts - Jenkins helm charts

turnstyle - 🎟️A GitHub Action for serializing workflow runs

cache - Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions

azure-pipelines-agent - Azure Pipelines Agent 🚀

act - Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

virtual-environments - GitHub Actions runner images [Moved to: https://github.com/actions/runner-images]

github-act-runner - act as self-hosted runner

mockoon - Mockoon is the easiest and quickest way to run mock APIs locally. No remote deployment, no account required, open source.

docker-github-runner-linux - Repository for building a self hosted GitHub runner as a ubuntu linux container

ghat - 🛕 Reuse GitHub Actions workflows across repositories

hadolint-gh-action - A hadolint linter for github actions that provides code annotations (and more)