Chapter 4: Working with Self-Hosted Runners

While GitHub offers the option to run jobs on GitHub-hosted runners, hosting your own runners can be an important advantage if your workflows demand highly customized environments.

In Chapter 3, A Closer Look at Workflows, you learned that GitHub Actions workflows can be as simple or as robust as you need them to be. You reviewed many examples of webhook events that trigger workflows, which illustrated how workflows can be used in the most diverse scenarios, such as translating issues or creating releases. Similarly, by using self-hosted runners, you can create virtual machines (VMs) or use hosts that will be as modest or as powerful as you need them to be while hosting the GitHub Actions runner application.

The skills you will learn in this chapter will allow you to understand the pros and cons of using a self-hosted runner when compared to using a GitHub-hosted runner. You will also see how to install the runner application, as...