Isn't GitHub Actions now open source? You can self-host runners now https://github.com/actions/runner or am I missing something?
In Act: Run your GitHub Actions locallyactions
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, 12:45:45 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
7 sourcesTheir self-hosted runners are pretty jank. If your workflow writes something to the docker container's user's home directory, you will see it in the next workflow you run. Due to this and other things, I need a "preamble" action that needs to run right after checkout. Oh, if don't checkout at the beginning of your workflow, you will be using the previous workflow's copy of the repository.
I'm 100% sure they don't use this internally as these are glaring issues that impacts anyone using the self hosted runner. They also recommend running the container as root[1] instead of designing something more secure and sane.
1: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/434#issuecomment-61...
In GitHub Actions PitfallsI find this entirely ridiculous. Just as a heuristic, the first complaint is about CoPilot. I don't use CoPilot. If that's the #1 complaint the rest is peanuts.
As for Github being proprietary, I don't get the issue. My supermarket is not open source. Should I ban it? To me, they are offering free services to support open source. Services that cost money. It costs money to store the data, to serve the data, to run the servers. It costs money to process github actions, to fight spam. to moderate disputes, etc...
Where is the lock in? Every piece of data related to your projects are available for you to access. Issues, Wikis, etc..
Even github actions, the runner is here and open source
https://github.com/actions/runner
There's no lock in. There's a company offering a free service to open source developers and hoping that you'll pay for any
Read the rest
thing not open source.
I don't see the issue any more than the fact that my grocery store is not some kind of collective.
> most of the new core infrastructure that Arm is deploying is on proprietary hardware
GitHub offers self-hosted CI runners, but it's infamously limited. Last I checked there's still no official GH runner release for arm64-darwin (for which community, including yours truly, provided reliable workarounds through Rosetta that still lands you in an arm64-darwin bash, and now IIUC actual native builds[1]), there's no way to select anything else than x64 in the UI for Windows and macOS, which sets some tags on the runners that you can't remove, and there's no way to say "Other" with a custom value. Comparatively, gitlab-runner is a crazy adaptable piece of code, that allows for quite unique setups[0], combined with the loose way one can automatically assign jobs to runners using tags GL pipelines trounce GHA workflows†.
[0]: https://docs.gitla
Read the rest
b.com/runner/executors/
[1]: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/805
† GHA covers 80% of cases (from basic to a bit more involved) somewhat nicely, but when it starts to fall short it's terrible.
> A large bonus for Arm was that GitLab is open source and the company wanted to use its own tools to support its open source ecosystem.
> minimize vendor lock-in
> Because Arm is an IP company, security is paramount
When GNU-ish philosophy meets business requirements. GitHub can be self-hosted (at a price!) but GitLab is FOSS, so it can be audited, and if necessary, forked. From code to data, it can be owned, end to end.
I am surprised to see that GitHub staff are still working on GitHub Actions. It's hard to tell because it's been almost two years and it's still not possible to have a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner on Mac M1: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/805, even though the community has made PRs for it.
In Supercharging GitHub Actions with Job SummariesThe details you listed sound accurate for the built-in GitHub-hosted runners.
GHA also supports bringing your own self-hosted runners [1][2] where you install their agent, so you could, e.g., use an ARM instance on AWS with tons of cores. It looks like CircleCI offers this as well.
[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...
[2]: https://github.com/actions/runner
In CircleCI DownGitHub actions bug: 'some' of your jobs will run, but build successful
2 points · Open discussion