Detect Self-Hosted Runner or GitHub Hosted Runner in GitHub Action Workflow

[PSchmiedmayer]

Select Topic Area

Question

Body

We are generating a general GitHub Action Workflow that can be used on self-hosted runners and GitHub-hosted runners.

As a result, we want to detect if the workflow is currently executing on a self-hosted runner to use this as a condition in an if statement in individual steps.

Unfortunately, we did not find a way to access the runner's labels nor any other flag or environment variable to detect if we are running the code on a self-hosted runner or on GitHub-provided runners. Are we missing a crucial detail there, or is there any mechanism to detect if a workflow is running on a GitHub-hosted runner or a self-hosted runner?

We greatly appreciate any input and help with this!

[jsoref]

Per @maskati https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/48359#discussioncomment-9059557, it's now possible to detect this directly (and will hopefully be eventually documented for github/docs#32443)

---

Previously...

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/contexts#example-contents-of-the-runner-context

You'll probably want runner.name

The self-hosted runners should have names that don't start with GitHub Actions. (If your self-hosted runners names' start with that, you're doing something wrong, and you should fix that...)

[PSchmiedmayer]

Thank you @jsoref for providing the additional context, that sounds like a good idea 👍

[maskati]

There seems to be a context property runner.environment that has the value github-hosted for GitHub hosted runners and self-hosted for self-hosted runners. Created a discussion where I suggest a documentation update.