Using a Raspberry Pi to run GitHub Actions locally #RaspberryPi @nicolas_frankel

With his newly acquired Raspberry Pi, Nicolas Frankel explored executing GitHub Actions not on Google itself but on a dedicated machine (the Pi).

GitHub Actions comprise two components:

• The GitHub Actions infrastructure itself. It hosts the scheduler of jobs.
• Runners, which do run the jobs

By default, jobs run on GitHub’s runners. However, it’s possible to configure one’s job to run on other runners, whether on-premise or in the Cloud: these are called self-hosted runners.

The process can be non-trivial but the blog post goes over the procedures.

Conclusion: Migrating from a GitHub runner to a self-hosted runner is not a big deal but requires changing some bits and pieces. Most importantly, you need to understand the script runs on the machine. This means you need to automate the provisioning of a new machine in the case of crashes. I’m considering the benefits of running the runner inside a container on the Pi to roll back to my previous steps.

See the article here.