Runners

In order for BuildJet for GitHub Actions to be used by your workflow job, we need to specify a runner tag in the jobs.[job-name].runs-on property.

Example

runs-on: buildjet-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204

Available runners#

AMD64#

If you want to use Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04, simply replace 2204 with 1804 or 2004 in the runner tag.

ARM#

NOTE: Unlike the AMD64 runners we only support Ubuntu 2204 on ARM.

Concurrent runners#

Every BuildJet for GitHub Actions account start with ability to run 64 concurrent AMD64 vCPU's and 32 concurrent ARM vCPU's, which is the upper limit of vCPU's you can have active in parallel. The more concurrent vCPu's you have available, the faster the queue of Workflow runs will finish.

If you would like to increase the number of concurrent runs you can make, please contact our customer support team here.

Which runner should I use?#

It's generally a good idea to start with the 4vCPU and move your way upwards. This can however take some time and is a bit cumbersome to do. To easily compare the performance of different runners, we recommend taking advantage of the built-in matrix feature in GitHub Actions:

jobs:
  test:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        runs-on: [buildjet-2vcpu-ubuntu-2204, buildjet-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204, buildjet-8vcpu-ubuntu-2204, buildjet-16vcpu-ubuntu-2204]
    name: Test - ${{matrix.runs-on}}
    runs-on: ${{matrix.runs-on}}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
...

With this method, you will be able to see the performance of each runner and compare the cost vs. performance on your specific workload.

Known differences between BuildJet and GitHub Actions#

The 18.04 and the 20.04 home folder is found in /home/ubuntu and not as with the default GitHub Actions runner in /home/runner.