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Using a Self-Hosted GitHub Runner for your GitHub Actions Jobs

NEVER USE A SELF-HOSTED GITHUB RUNNER ON A PUBLIC REPOSITORY - Any individual may open a pull request against your repository and run malicious code in your runner environment.

About

As a part of your GitHub actions workflows, you may need access to internal CMS tooling that is inaccessible from GitHub's hosted runners. Using a self-hosted runner with access to the CMS network solves this problem.

Prerequisites

This procedure assumes that you have already taken the steps documented in the main README. You have:

  • Instantiated the requisite infrastructure in AWS ECR and ECS
  • Instantiated the resources for the GitHub OIDC provider and stored the OIDC role ARN in a GitHub secret called OIDC_IAM_ROLE_ARN

Usage

In the root of your repository, create a directory to house your workflow and a .yml file for the workflow:

mkdir -p .github/workflow
touch .github/workflow/your-workflow.yml

Your workflow must contain the start-runners and stop-runners jobs listed below.

name: your-workflow-name

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

name: internal runners test

permissions:
  id-token: write # this permission is required to authorize the request for the GitHub OIDC token used by the configure-aws-credentials action

jobs:
  start-runners:
    name: Provision self-hosted runners
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Configure AWS credentials
        uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
        with:
          aws-region: us-east-1
          role-to-assume: ${{ secrets.OIDC_IAM_ROLE_ARN }}

      - name: Scale up ECS service
        uses: Enterprise-CMCS/ecs-scale-service@main
        with:
          cluster: ${{ your self-hosted runner cluster }}
          service: ${{ your self-hosted runner service }}
          desired-count: 2

  test-self-hosted:
    name: Testing self-hosted tag
    needs: start-runners
    runs-on: self-hosted
    steps:
      - name: step 1
        run: echo "Hello World!"

  test-internal-tools:
    name: Testing internal tool connectivity
    needs: start-runners
    runs-on: self-hosted
    steps:
      - name: curl selenium
        run: curl --connect-timeout 5 https://selenium.cloud.cms.gov
      - name: curl artifactory
        run: curl --connect-timeout 5 https://artifactory.cloud.cms.gov/ui/packages

  stop-runners:
    name: Deprovision self-hosted runners
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: always()
    needs: [start-runners, test-self-hosted, test-internal-tools]
    steps:
      - name: Configure AWS credentials
        uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
        with:
          aws-region: us-east-1
          role-to-assume: ${{ secrets.OIDC_IAM_ROLE_ARN }}

      - name: Scale down ECS service
        uses: Enterprise-CMCS/ecs-scale-service@main
        with:
          cluster: ${{ your self-hosted runner cluster }}
          service: ${{ your self-hosted runner service }}
          desired-count: 0

Any existing workflows that you have that you wish to run on a self-hosted runner can be run by simply changing the runs-on argument from a GitHub hosted tag (e.g. ubuntu-latest) to self-hosted.

In order to ensure that the runners are removed following the completion of the tasks and not any sooner, you must populate the list of steps that the remove-runners job depends on with the full list of your jobs. For example, if you have a workflow that looks like:

jobs:
  start-runners: ...
  job1: ...
  job2: ...
  job3: ...
  stop-runners: ...

then your needs variable under stop-runners should be populated with [start-runners, job1, job2, job3]. Using if: always() on the stop-runners job ensures that the runners will be deprovisioned even if some of the workflows on the runners fail.

Tools

The self-hosted runner image is intentionally lightweight and contains the following tools:

  • the Actions runner
  • curl
  • jq
  • uuid-runtime
  • unzip

You should be sure to install any other prerequisites onto the self-hosted runner before the steps that require them. For example, you could use the setup-node action before any steps that require Node.

- name: Set up Node
  uses: actions/setup-node@v4
  with:
    node-version: 20