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)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
runner actions-runner-controller
58 31
4,489 4,216
2.4% 3.4%
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

  • please dont state this as a "workaround". your version simply "pretends" it is a tty when infact it is not an actual tty
    1 project | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 5 Dec 2023
  • PySide vs. .NET WinForms for a Desktop GUI App in 2023?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Nov 2023
    Even if you don’t pick Avalonia, their notes for Mac distribution look useful:

    https://docs.avaloniaui.net/docs/distribution-publishing/mac...

    For example, the GitHub actions runner itself is a modern .NET core project with CI except for .app packaging.

    https://github.com/actions/runner/tree/main/.github/workflow...

  • GitHub Actions Are a Problem
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    This probably answers your question:

    https://github.com/actions/runner/blob/a4c57f27477077e57545a...

  • DevOps CI/CD Quick Start Guide with GitHub Actions πŸ› οΈπŸ™βš‘οΈ
    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.
  • GitHub Actions Frequently Failing
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Sep 2023
  • Runners fail to set up job with tar -xzf error
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Sep 2023
  • 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

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

  • Best CI/CD for AWS services?
    1 project | /r/aws | 24 Jun 2023
    Almost all of our cicd, builds run on GitHub. I'm talking cypress tests, deployments via terraform and helm to over 25 environments, all backend tests, daily test runs etc. Overall we were racking up a cost of almost 20k on GitHub. With the ARC deployed and using spot instances I think our total infrastructure costs went up about 4-5k even though we added more actions. If we switched back to their runners we'd probably be around 25k at this point.
  • Running helm from within network
    1 project | /r/docker | 12 Jun 2023
    What else needs to be moved to my artifactory (charts - https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller/tree/master/charts ) - if so tar or entire folder or anything else ? ) What should the above steps correspond to?
  • Action-runner-controller & Enterprise Git
    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.
  • GitHub support for Actions Runner Controller (ARC) emerging in docs!
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 25 Apr 2023
    Honestly not a fan of Github docs.....I feel like the ones in the repo are much clearer and easier to understand/read.
  • How much work does it take to operate a self-hosted GitHub runners?
    1 project | /r/devops | 30 Mar 2023
    Its pretty easy to set up honestly. Deploy this on your k8s cluster https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller and a runnerDeployment and youre good to go.
  • Self-Hosted runner on Kubernetes
    1 project | /r/github | 29 Mar 2023
    Trying to use the Actions Runner Controller (https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller) to utilize self-hosted runners. I keep getting this error on the controller.
  • AKS cluster w/ GitHub App and Actions Runner Controller
    1 project | /r/github | 28 Feb 2023
    I'm convinced one of (or a combination) of things is happening here in regards to authentication. This GH enterprise account is configured with SAML. I feel like that is a valid data point. I'm using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller as a reference guide for what I should be doing. I suspect whoever is Owner of this organization has modified what I can do as a user. The steps in the doc where I can actually Install the Application isn't available to me. When configuring the GitHub App I'm given two options. I select the option for "this account only" knowing the documentation says it is possible to use this Github App with a repo in the Organization as long as I have Admin privileges or I'm the owner.

What are some alternatives?

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

act - Run your GitHub Actions locally πŸš€

helm-charts - Jenkins helm charts

azure-pipelines-agent - Azure Pipelines Agent πŸš€

turnstyle - 🎟️A GitHub Action for serializing workflow runs

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

cache - Cache dependencies and build outputs in GitHub Actions

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.

ghat - πŸ›• Reuse GitHub Actions workflows across repositories

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

actions-runner-