Alibaba Cloud - Github Action Runner

Objective: To host Github Action Runner in Alicloud environment

There are 2 types of runner in Github, repository level and organization level. In order for this to work ensure that your alibaba kubernetes cluster is running Alicloud Cloud OS 3

Prerequisite:

1. Install kubectl in local machine Download Kubectl for Windows

2. Install helm in local machine Helm | Installing Helm

3. Setup kubectl pointing to ACK. Go to Alicloud ACK cluster > Connection Info Container Service Console

4. Go to Github, generate github PAT under

Account > Settings > Developer Settings > Personal accesss tokens > Tokens (classic)

with repo scope for repo level runner or repo+admin:org scope for org level runner

Steps 1: Prepare a script

Create a script call arc-runner-set-values.yaml (dind mode is required for docker build to execute). This will spawn max 3 runners

 ## maxRunners is the max number of runners the autoscaling runner set will scale up to.
 maxRunners: 3

 ## minRunners is the min number of runners the autoscaling runner set will scale down to.
 minRunners: 1

 ## Container mode is an object that provides out-of-box configuration
 ## for dind and kubernetes mode. Template will be modified as documented under the
 ## template object.
 ##
 ## If any customization is required for dind or kubernetes mode, containerMode should remain
 ## empty, and configuration should be applied to the template.
 containerMode:
  type: "dind"

Step 2: Helm install action runner controller (ARC) in ACK

 NAMESPACE="github-runner-ctrl"
 helm install arc --namespace "${NAMESPACE}" --create-namespace oci://ghcr.io/actions/actions-runner-controller-charts/gha-runner-scale-set-controller

Note: can use yaml files to override default values

Step 3: Helm install runner scale set in ACK

INSTALLATION_NAME="github-runner"
NAMESPACE="github-runner-pod"
GITHUB_CONFIG_URL="https://github.com/{your_organization}"
GITHUB_PAT="<PAT>"
helm install "${INSTALLATION_NAME}" \
    --namespace "${NAMESPACE}" \
    --create-namespace \
    --set githubConfigUrl="${GITHUB_CONFIG_URL}" \
    --set githubConfigSecret.github_token="${GITHUB_PAT}" \
    --values arc-runner-set-values.yaml \
    oci://ghcr.io/actions/actions-runner-controller-charts/gha-runner-scale-set

To install runner in org level:

i. Update GITHUB_CONFIG_URL to org URL, for example

ii. Update https://github.com/{your org} GITHUB_PAT to include rights under repo and admin:org (refer to prerequisite)

3. Run helm list -A to check whether arc-systems and arc-runners are installed

4. Run kubectl get pods -n arc-systems to check both controller and listener is running

5. Go to github repo and check self-hosted runner is registered