Self-hosted runners

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How to set up GitHub Action runners on self-hosted infrastructure

This repository explains how to set up a server for running continuous integration tests on other hardware than what GitHub provides. This can be useful when the code you want to test has special requirements, for example if

• it needs a GPU to run (CUDA installation with ansible instructions)
• it needs multiple nodes
• testing requires data that needs to stay on-premises for privacy reasons or legal reasons
• testing requires data that is too big to move
• testing requires specific software

This guide distinguishes between the client and the server; the client is your own machine; the server is whichever machine runs the tests. For either side, we'll explain what configuration needs to be done. For people who just want to try out the instructions but don't have access to remote hardware, we included a few alternatives for running the server locally as well, through the use of virtualization (with VirtualBox) and containerization (with Docker).

For the client, we included instructions for Linux Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows; the server-side instructions all assume Linux Ubuntu.

Status	Client OS	Server hardware	Runner
✔️ Completed	Linux Ubuntu	local machine via Docker	link
✔️ Completed	Linux Ubuntu	local machine via Singularity	link
✔️ Completed	Linux Ubuntu	local machine via Vagrant	link
✔️ Completed	Linux Ubuntu	local machine via VirtualBox	link
✔️ Completed	Linux Ubuntu	remote machine at SURF HPC Cloud	link
⏳ WIP	Mac	local machine via Docker	-
⏳ WIP	Mac	local machine via Vagrant	-
⏳ WIP	Mac	local machine via VirtualBox	-
⏳ WIP	Mac	remote machine at SURF HPC Cloud	-
⏳ WIP	Windows	local machine via Docker	-
✔️ Completed	Windows	local machine via Vagrant	link
⏳ WIP	Windows	local machine via VirtualBox	-
✔️ Completed	Windows	remote machine at SURF HPC Cloud	link

Security

A warning from GitHub for self-hosted runners in combination with public repositories is shown here. Please take this seriously. It basically means that the combination of a self-hosted runner and a public GitHub repository is unsafe. However, there was a recent discussion indicating that GitHub may add features to make this combination safe in the near future.

Documentation for developers

If you want to check if the links in your markdown work, install markdown-link-check

npm install

then run

find . -name '*.md' -not -path './node_modules/*' -exec markdown-link-check '{}' --config .mlc-config.json ';'