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About self-hosted runners

You can host your own runners and customize the environment used to run jobs in your GitHub Actions workflows.

In this article

About self-hosted runners

A self-hosted runner is a system that you deploy and manage to execute jobs from GitHub Actions on GitHub.

Self-hosted runners:

  • Are free to use with GitHub Actions, but you are responsible for the cost of maintaining your runner machines.
  • Let you create custom hardware configurations that meet your needs with processing power or memory to run larger jobs, install software available on your local network.
  • Receive automatic updates for the self-hosted runner application only, though you may disable automatic updates of the runner.
  • Can use cloud services or local machines that you already pay for.
  • Don't need to have a clean instance for every job execution.
  • Can be organized into groups to restrict access to specific workflows, organizations, and repositories. See Managing access to self-hosted runners using groups.
  • Can be physical, virtual, in a container, on-premises, or in a cloud.

You can use self-hosted runners anywhere in the management hierarchy. Repository-level runners are dedicated to a single repository, while organization-level runners can process jobs for multiple repositories in an organization. Organization owners can choose which repositories are allowed to create repository-level self-hosted runners. See Disabling or limiting GitHub Actions for your organization. Finally, enterprise-level runners can be assigned to multiple organizations in an enterprise account.

Requirements for self-hosted runner machines

You can use any machine as a self-hosted runner as long at it meets these requirements:

  • You can install and run the self-hosted runner application on the machine.
  • The machine can communicate with GitHub Actions.
  • The machine has enough hardware resources for the type of workflows you plan to run. The self-hosted runner application itself only requires minimal resources.
  • If you want to run workflows that use Docker container actions or service containers, you must use a Linux machine and Docker must be installed.

Supported actions on self-hosted runners

All actions/setup-LANGUAGE action repositories currently support three platforms: macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu. Some extra configuration might be required to use actions from GitHub with GitHub Enterprise Server, or to use the actions/setup-LANGUAGE actions with self-hosted runners that do not have internet access. For more information, see Managing access to actions from GitHub.com and contact your GitHub Enterprise site administrator.

Further reading