On-demand self-hosted runner for GitHub Actions

Start your EC2 self-hosted runner right before you need it. Run the job on it. Finally, stop it when you finish. And all this automatically as a part of your GitHub Actions workflow.

It relies on Slab CI bot to do all the heavy-lifting.

See below the YAML code of the depicted workflow.

Usage
- Inputs
- Outputs
- Example
License Summary

Usage

Inputs

Name	Required	Description
`mode`	Always required.	Specify here which mode you want to use: `start` to start a new runner, `stop` to stop the previously created runner.
`github-token`	Always required.	GitHub Personal Access Token with the `repo` scope assigned.
`slab-url`	Always required.	URL to Slab CI server.
`job-secret`	Always required.	Secret key used by Slab to perform HMAC computation.
`backend`	Required with `start` mode.	Backend provider name to look for in slab.toml file in repository that uses the action.
`profile`	Required with `start` mode.	Profile to use as described slab.toml file in repository that uses the action.
`label`	Required with `stop` mode.	Name of the unique label assigned to the runner.The label is provided by the output of the action in the `start` mode.The label is used to remove the runner from GitHub when the runner is not needed anymore.

Outputs

Name	Description
`label`	Name of the unique label assigned to the runner. The label is used in two cases: to use as the input of `runs-on` property for the following jobs and to remove the runner from GitHub when it is not needed anymore.

Examples

Here's an example workflow. It uses a backend profile declared in ci/slab.toml within the calling repository

name: do-the-job
on: pull_request
jobs:
  start-runner:
    name: Start self-hosted EC2 runner
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      label: ${{ steps.start-ec2-runner.outputs.label }}
      ec2-instance-id: ${{ steps.start-ec2-runner.outputs.ec2-instance-id }}
    steps:
      - name: Start EC2 runner
        id: start-ec2-runner
        uses: zama-ai/slab-github-runner@v1
        with:
          mode: start
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GH_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          backend: aws
          profile: cpu-test

  do-the-job:
      # ... #

  stop-runner:
    name: Stop self-hosted EC2 runner
    needs:
      - start-runner # required to get output from the start-runner job
      - do-the-job # required to wait when the main job is done
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: ${{ always() }} # required to stop the runner even if the error happened in the previous jobs
    steps:
      - name: Stop EC2 runner
        uses: zama-ai/slab-github-runner@v1
        with:
          mode: stop
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GH_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
          label: ${{ needs.start-runner.outputs.label }}

License Summary

This code is made available under the MIT license.

zama-ai / slab-github-runner

readme