GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • runner

    The Runner for GitHub Actions :rocket:

    This feature was delayed every month after May.

    And yet it is still half baked. We prepared for this with internally shared docs and the branch built in private for a while, but still had to roll back yesterday because the scheduler reverted to putting jobs wherever it pleased (including on ephemeral runners that already have a job) and randomly cancels large sets of jobs too.

    I have been of the opinion that investing into GH Actions at this stage is purely sunken cost (at my org), and I'm not moving until the team behind this thing ships something that doesn't break half the time. These have been seriously frustrating months, because no amount of working around this messy code[1] made of 5 layers of MS style .NET (seriously, deleting a directory goes 5 layers deep in the call stack) will ever produce a stable product. They don't even know their own code base that well, when they first attempted ephemeral runners with `--once` it turned out the thing they produced could never work (because the server-side scheduler loves pipelining jobs to machines and failing miserably when these disappear, job times out after 20 minute of waiting type)

    [1]: https://github.com/actions/runner

  • actions-runner-controller

    Kubernetes controller for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners

    It's not official, but there are K8s / github actions runner deployments: https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-...

    I've been playing about with this and it seems to work quite well. Startup latency is quite high, and it's one pod-per-job (I think), but seems pretty flexible.

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    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • It's not official, but there are K8s / github actions runner deployments: https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-...

    I've been playing about with this and it seems to work quite well. Startup latency is quite high, and it's one pod-per-job (I think), but seems pretty flexible.

  • github-act-runner

    act as self-hosted runner

  • duckduckgo-locales

    Translation files for <a href="https://duckduckgo.com"> </a>

    GitHub's own documentation about GHA has a nav section titled "Hosting your own runners".

    Here's a link: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=github+actions+self+hosted+runners

  • azure-pipelines-agent

    Azure Pipelines Agent 🚀

    You can also compare the source code structure to the Azure Devops Pipeline agent's to tell pretty easily that the github runner is a fork what has been edited to process the somewhat different format of the actions YAML.

    https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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