This controller operates self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions on your Kubernetes cluster.
GitHub Actions is very useful as a tool for automating development. GitHub Actions job is run in the cloud by default, but you may want to run your jobs in your environment. Self-hosted runner can be used for such use cases, but requires the provision of a virtual machine instance and configuration. If you already have a Kubernetes cluster, you'll want to run the self-hosted runner on top of it.
actions-runner-controller makes that possible. Just create a Runner resource on your Kubernetes, and it will run and operate the self-hosted runner of the specified repository. Combined with Kubernetes RBAC, you can also build simple Self-hosted runners as a Service.
First, install actions-runner-controller with a manifest file. This will create a actions-runner-system namespace in your Kubernetes and deploy the required resources.
$ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/summerwind/actions-runner-controller/releases/latest/download/actions-runner-controller.yaml
Set your access token of GitHub to the secret. ${GITHUB_TOKEN}
is the value you must replace with your access token. This token is used to register Self-hosted runner by actions-runner-controller.
$ kubectl create secret generic controller-manager --from-literal=github_token=${GITHUB_TOKEN} -n actions-runner-system
There's generally two ways to use this controller:
- Manage runners one by one with
Runner
- Manage a set of runners with
RunnerDeployment
To launch a single Self-hosted runner, you need to create a manifest file includes Runner resource as follows. This example launches a self-hosted runner with name example-runner for the summerwind/actions-runner-controller repository.
# runner.yaml
apiVersion: actions.summerwind.dev/v1alpha1
kind: Runner
metadata:
name: example-runner
spec:
repository: summerwind/actions-runner-controller
Apply the created manifest file to your Kubernetes.
$ kubectl apply -f runner.yaml
runner.actions.summerwind.dev/example-runner created
You can see that the Runner resource has been created.
$ kubectl get runners
NAME REPOSITORY STATUS
example-runner summerwind/actions-runner-controller Running
You can also see that the runner pod has been running.
$ kubectl get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
example-runner 2/2 Running 0 1m
The runner you created has been registerd to your repository.
Now your can use your self-hosted runner. See the official documentation on how to run a job with it.
There's also RunnerReplicaSet
and RunnerDeployment
that corresponds to ReplicaSet
and Deployment
but for Runner
.
You usually need only RunnerDeployment
rather than RunnerReplicaSet
as the former is for managing the latter.
# runnerdeployment.yaml
apiVersion: actions.summerwind.dev/v1alpha1
kind: RunnerDeployment
metadata:
name: example-runnerdeploy
spec:
replicas: 2
template:
spec:
repository: mumoshu/actions-runner-controller-ci
Apply the manifest file to your cluster:
$ kubectl apply -f runner.yaml
runnerdeployment.actions.summerwind.dev/example-runnerdeploy created
You can see that 2 runners has been created as specified by replicas: 2
:
$ kubectl get runners
NAME REPOSITORY STATUS
NAME REPOSITORY STATUS
example-runnerdeploy2475h595fr mumoshu/actions-runner-controller-ci Running
example-runnerdeploy2475ht2qbr mumoshu/actions-runner-controller-ci Running