The biggest problem with GitHub Actions that you can't restart just one job[1], it always restarts all jobs in the workflow. And this bug is not fixed for quite a while. Travis CI and Appveyor both allow that, of course.
[1] https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/432
In GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scalingactions
runner
C#2019–2026
actions / runner
runner
The Runner for GitHub Actions :rocket:
58Distinct people
61Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Runner for GitHub Actions :rocket:
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- sdsc-ordes/quitsh · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year61 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-12-19 20:05:01 UTC to 2026-06-05 15:47:59 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 25 | 5 | 20 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
GitHub Actions Runner
The runner is the application that runs a job from a GitHub Actions workflow. It is used by GitHub Actions in the hosted virtual environments, or you can self-host the runner in your own environment.
Get Started
For more information about installing and using self-hosted runners, see Adding self-hosted runners and Using self-hosted runners in a workflow
Runner releases:
Pre-reqs | Download
Pre-reqs | Download
Pre-reqs | Download
Note
Thank you for your interest in this GitHub repo, however, right now we are not taking contributions.
We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in.
We are taking the following steps to better direct requests related to GitHub Actions, including:
We will be directing questions and support requests to our Community Discussions area
High Priority bugs can be reported through Community Discussions or you can report these to our support team https://support.github.com/contact/bug-report.
Security Issues should be handled as per our SECURITY.md
We will still provide security updates for this project and fix major breaking changes during this time.
You are welcome to still raise bugs in this repo.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
9 sourcesThe feature pull request has been there for over a year[1], it’s nice that’s it’s released!
Incoming shameless plug; if you don’t have to handle the hosting runners, but still to reap the benefits of having proper hardware(close to the metal). Check out BuildJet for GitHub actions - 2x the speed for half the price. Easy to install and easy to revert.
[1] https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660
[2] https://buildjet.com/for-github-actions
In GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scalingThis feature was delayed every month after May.
And yet it is still half baked. We prepared for this with internally shared docs and the branch built in private for a while, but still had to roll back yesterday because the scheduler reverted to putting jobs wherever it pleased (including on ephemeral runners that already have a job) and randomly cancels large sets of jobs too.
I have been of the opinion that investing into GH Actions at this stage is purely sunken cost (at my org), and I'm not moving until the team behind this thing ships something that doesn't break half the time. These have been seriously frustrating months, because no amount of working around this messy code[1] made of 5 layers of MS style .NET (seriously, deleting a directory goes 5 layers deep in the call stack) will ever produce a stable product. They don't even kno
Read the rest
w their own code base that well, when they first attempted ephemeral runners with `--once` it turned out the thing they produced could never work (because the server-side scheduler loves pipelining jobs to machines and failing miserably when these disappear, job times out after 20 minute of waiting type)
[1]: https://github.com/actions/runner
Ephemeral runner support has been highly anticipated for our organization - I'm excited to see it go live!
However, GitHub Enterprise admins may want to take caution - some users have reported that the changes are not currently compatible https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660
In GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scalingOne relatively simple thing I'd love is the ability to re-run a job where it fails, which is something other CI systems have. On a current project we have some flaky Cypress tests and it sucks to have to re-run the entire workflow from the start when one of the last steps of the job fails. I'm definitely not the only one wanting this [1].
They also offer triggering workflows with 'workflow_run' based on other workflows, but that only happens on the default main branch. We auto build testing environments on each PR and I'd love to be able to have better workflow management based on branches.
[1] https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/432
In Automating a Software Company with GitHub ActionsAnyone got any good tips on how to run github action workflows locally or self-hosted? Incidents like this make me want to self-host our CI/CD.
I'm confused as to the difference between https://github.com/nektos/act and https://github.com/actions/runner
Is it not possible to use 'runner' to run github actions locally? The docs for this seem like they are extremely sparse - probably because this competes with the paid option?
In Incident with GitHub Actions, API Requests, Git Operations, Issues and moreYeah. I really hope they fix the dumb runner part: https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660
I resorted to this one instead https://github.com/summerwind/actions-runner-controller
but it requires kubernetes...
In Modern CI is too complex and misdirectedI think they migrated the .NET code from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions a while ago. It was open sourced somewhere but I cannot find the repo now. Not sure if they have made the repo private again but Microsoft has moved a lot of staff from Azure to GitHub and since then GitHub has taken a dive in quality and reliability of their services for sure.
EDIT:
Here's the source:
https://github.com/actions/runner
This code is identical to the runner code for Azure DevOps.
Also the repo history only goes back a little while, so you know that this wasn't the original code and they migrated the code from Azure to GitHub and then made the C# code public.
I highly doubt that GitHub and Azure have independently written the exact same code in C#, especially since GitHub didn't even use C# before Microsoft's acquisition.
Seems things have hugely degrade
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d since then. I'm even surprised that they decided to replace GitHub's own work with Azure DevOps's code. Feels more like a slow organisational move from DevOps to GitHub and for marketing purposes replace GitHub's Python, Go and other code with C#.
Wait for the next big Microsoft conference when MSFT will shout through megaphones how .NET and C# has been powering millions of customers on GitHub and been a huge "success".
So far the only big projects using .NET have been Bing (of course lol) and StackOverflow. Microsoft has been longing for something else to finally use .NET for a respected project. Since nothing happened organically they had to buy their way in :P