docker-development-youtube-series/github/actions/self-hosted-runner

Introduction to GitHub Actions: Self hosted runners

Create a kubernetes cluster

In this guide we we''ll need a Kubernetes cluster for testing. Let's create one using kind

kind create cluster --name githubactions --image kindest/node:v1.28.0@sha256:b7a4cad12c197af3ba43202d3efe03246b3f0793f162afb40a33c923952d5b31

Let's test our cluster:

kubectl get nodes
NAME                          STATUS   ROLES           AGE     VERSION
githubactions-control-plane   Ready    control-plane   2m53s   v1.28.0

Running the Runner in Docker

We can simply install this directly on to virtual machines , but for this demo, I'd like to run it in Kubernetes inside a container.

Security notes

• Running in Docker needs high priviledges.
• Would not recommend to use these on public repositories.
• Would recommend to always run your CI systems in seperate Kubernetes clusters.

Creating a Dockerfile

• Installing Docker CLI For this to work we need a dockerfile and follow instructions to Install Docker. I would grab the content and create statements for my dockerfile
  

Now notice that we only install the docker CLI.
This is because we want our running to be able to run docker commands , but the actual docker server runs elsewhere
This gives you flexibility to tighten security by running docker on the host itself and potentially run the container runtime in a non-root environment

• Installing Github Actions Runner

Next up we will need to install the GitHub actions runner in our dockerfile Now to give you a "behind the scenes" of how I usually build my dockerfiles, I run a container to test my installs:

docker build . -t github-runner:latest 
docker run -it github-runner bash

Next steps:

• Now we can see docker is installed
• To see how a runner is installed, lets go to our repo | runner and click "New self-hosted runner"
• Try these steps in the container
• We will needfew dependencies
• We download the runner
• TODO

Finally lets test the runner in docker

docker run -it -e GITHUB_PERSONAL_TOKEN="" -e GITHUB_OWNER=marcel-dempers -e GITHUB_REPOSITORY=docker-development-youtube-series github-runner

Deploy to Kubernetes

Load our github runner image so we dont need to push it to a registry:

kind load docker-image github-runner:latest --name githubactions

Create a kubernetes secret with our github details

kubectl create ns github
kubectl -n github create secret generic github-secret `
  --from-literal GITHUB_OWNER=marcel-dempers `
  --from-literal GITHUB_REPOSITORY=docker-development-youtube-series `
  --from-literal GITHUB_PERSONAL_TOKEN=""

kubectl -n github apply -f kubernetes.yaml