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runner
C#2019–2026
actions / runner

runner

The Runner for GitHub Actions :rocket:

DevOps & Cloud
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
58Distinct people
61Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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

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.

05101520252019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 2 submissions, 6 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 25 mentions; 5 submissions, 20 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* 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
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC826
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC25520
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

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 GitHub

What Hacker News says

25 sources
hoten·Dec 16, 2025
I wonder how much they made from engineering practices such as https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792. To spell it out: jobs can hang forever because of some ridiculously bad code on their end, they have a 6 hour cap, so that's 6 hours of billable $$$ per-instance of the bug (assuming it wasn't manually canceled). I know I've seen jobs hang forever regularly over the course of my years using GitHub for work. Note: pretty sure this has been resolved.
In Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
ssivark·Nov 27, 2025
> created by monkeys I don't particularly care for either Zig or Github, but... they do precisely cite the technical issues. That snippet links to a Github discussion comment https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3... (reproduced below) "The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks." "I don't understand how we got here. E
Read the rest
ven ignoring the pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting." "The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts; logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when compared with alternatives." ---- I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
In Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg
VGHN7XDuOXPAzol·Sep 22, 2025
> Conforming to a complex specification is not inherently a good thing Kind of a hard disagree here; if you don't want to conform to a specification, don't claim that you're accepting documents from that specification. Call it github-flavored YAML (GFY) or something and accept a different file extension. https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/1182 > YAML 1.1 to be an important goal: they still don't support merge keys right, they don't do merge keys because it's not in YAML 1.2 anymore. Anchors are, however. They haven't said that noncompliance with YAML 1.2 spec is intentional
In Dear GitHub: no YAML anchors, please
kristoff_it·Sep 3, 2025
The longevity of donation platforms is a major concern for us and GitHub has not been good in that sense. GitHub Sponsors has not seen a single improvement in the years after its launch (despite us and other organizations chatting with GitHub employees about critical missing features), and GitHub Actions has been tragicomically buggy, clearly showing that software engineering infrastructure is not GitHub's core focus anymore (on top of, you know, the CEO explicitly saying that GitHub is an AI company now). Related https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 Since we do see ourselves eventually migrating away from GitHub (at least in some form), we would like to steer donations towards a service that we have higher confidence in.
In Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser
TheDong·Aug 25, 2025
Good luck with that. People over in this github-actions issue are struggling to get github's attention for a 1-line fix to stop hanging jobs forever https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3... That bug is incredibly dumb and obvious. There's been a PR to fix it for over a year with no attention. I bet there's not a dedicated "github domain names" team, it's probably part of some overworked platform or infrastructure team, and there's no chance in hell any email you send to microsoft or github will end up with that team ever. You won't have anyone to transfer the names to, you'll just be holding them and paying for them forever. The best thing you can do if you want to fix this is: 1. Don't make typos. 2. Email github and tell them to reserve typosquat domains, and know it will get ignored, or _maybe_ added to a backlog
Read the rest
and ignored for at least the next 15 years 3. Don't make typos. 4. Don't use ghcr for anything, and always mirror public ghcr.io packages using a "bot" github account with only permissions to public repositories to minimize blast radius. Actually, the best bet to get this fixed is to wait for Microsoft to provide "Email Github Copilot support", hope that they hooked it up so the AI is capable of making purchase decisions, and convince it to purchase about 6000 domain names that might be typoes for security reasons.
In Ghrc.io appears to be malicious

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