vegardit/gitea-act-runner

1. What is it?
2. Usage
3. License

What is it?

debian:stable-slim based Docker image containing Gitea's act_runner

Why not using Alpine Linux?

• musl-libc - Alpine's Greatest Weakness https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musl-libc-alpines-greatest-weakness-rogan-lynch
• Why I will never use Alpine Linux ever again https://martinheinz.dev/blog/92
• Does Alpine have known DNS issue within Kubernetes? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65181012/
• Why is the Alpine Docker image over 50% slower than the Ubuntu image? https://superuser.com/questions/1219609/
• Performance issue with alpine musl library https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/729342/

Usage

The docker image comes in three flavors:

• vegardit/gitea-act-runner:latest: only contains the Gitea act_runner and executes workflows in containers of the docker engine running act_runner itself (DooD / Docker-out-of-Docker approach)
• vegardit/gitea-act-runner:dind-latest: executes workflows using an embedded docker engine (DinD / Docker-in-Docker approach) providing better process isolation
• vegardit/gitea-act-runner:dind-rootless-latest: executes workflows using an embedded docker engine (DinD / Docker-in-Docker approach) running the docker daemon as a non-root user (Rootless mode)

Docker Run

Running from the command line:

• Docker-out-of-Docker approach

    docker run \
      -e GITEA_INSTANCE_URL=https://gitea.example.com \
      -e GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN=<INSERT_TOKEN_HERE> \
      --name gitea_act_runner \
      -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:rw \
      vegardit/gitea-act-runner:latest

• Docker-in-Docker approach

    docker run \
      -e GITEA_INSTANCE_URL=https://gitea.example.com \
      -e GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN=<INSERT_TOKEN_HERE> \
      --name gitea_act_runner \
      --privileged
      vegardit/gitea-act-runner:dind-latest

• Docker-in-Docker approach with Docker daemon running as a non-root user (Rootless mode)

    docker run \
      -e GITEA_INSTANCE_URL=https://gitea.example.com \
      -e GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN=<INSERT_TOKEN_HERE> \
      --name gitea_act_runner \
      --privileged
      vegardit/gitea-act-runner:dind-rootless-latest

Docker Compose

Example docker-compose.yml:

• Docker-out-of-Docker approach

  version: '3.8' # https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-versioning/
  
  services:
  
    gitea_act_runner:
      image: vegardit/gitea-act-runner:latest
      #image: ghcr.io/vegardit/gitea-act-runner:latest
      restart: always
      volumes:
        - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:rw
        - /my/path/to/data/dir:/data:rw # the config file is located at /data/.runner and needs to survive container restarts
      environment:
        TZ: "Europe/Berlin"
        # config parameters for initial runner registration:
        GITEA_INSTANCE_URL: 'https://gitea.example.com' # required
        GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN_FILE: 'path/to/file' # one-time registration token, only required on first container start
        # or: GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN: '<INSERT_TOKEN_HERE>'

• Docker-in-Docker approach

  version: '3.8' # https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-versioning/
  
  services:
  
    gitea_act_runner:
      image: vegardit/gitea-act-runner:dind-latest
      #image: ghcr.io/vegarditgitea-act-runner:dind-latest
      privileged: true
      restart: always
      volumes:
        - /my/path/to/data/dir:/data:rw # the config file is located at /data/.runner and needs to survive container restarts
      environment:
        TZ: "Europe/Berlin"
        # config parameters for initial runner registration:
        GITEA_INSTANCE_URL: 'https://gitea.example.com' # required
        GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN_FILE: 'path/to/file' # one-time registration token, only required on first container start
        # or: GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN: '<INSERT_TOKEN_HERE>'

Additional environment variables

The following environment variables can be specified to further configure the service.

Runner registration:

Name	Default Value	Description
GITEA_INSTANCE_INSECURE	false	It true don't verify the TLS certificate of the Gitea instance
GITEA_RUNNER_NAME	<empty>	If not specified the container's hostname is used
GITEA_RUNNER_LABELS	<empty>	Comma-separated list of labels in the format of label[:schema[:args]]. If not specified the following labels are used ubuntu-latest:docker://catthehacker/ubuntu:act-22.04,ubuntu-22.04:docker://catthehacker/ubuntu:act-22.04,ubuntu-20.04:docker://catthehacker/ubuntu:act-20.04
GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_FILE	/data/.runner	The JSON file that holds the result from the runner registration with the Gitea instance
GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TIMEOUT	30	In case of failure, registration is retried until this timeout in seconds is reached
GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_RETRY_INTERVAL	5	Wait period in seconds between registration retries

Runner runtime config:

Name	Default Value	Description
GITEA_RUNNER_CONFIG_TEMPLATE_FILE	/opt/config.template.yaml	Template to derive the effective config file from, see image/config.template.yaml
GITEA_RUNNER_UID	1000	The UID of the Gitea runner process
GITEA_RUNNER_GID	1000	The GID of the Gitea runner process
GITEA_RUNNER_LOG_EFFECTIVE_CONFIG	false	If set to true logs the effective YAML configuration to stdout during startup.

Runner config template variables

The following environment variables are referenced in the /opt/config.template.yaml file.

Name	Default Value	Description
GITEA_RUNNER_LOG_LEVEL	info	The level of logging, can be trace, debug, info, warn, error, fatal
GITEA_RUNNER_ENV_FILE	/data/.env	Extra environment variables to run jobs from a file
GITEA_RUNNER_FETCH_TIMEOUT	5s	The timeout for fetching the job from the Gitea instance
GITEA_RUNNER_FETCH_INTERVAL	2s	The interval for fetching the job from the Gitea instance
GITEA_RUNNER_MAX_PARALLEL_JOBS	1	Maximum number of concurrently executed jobs
GITEA_RUNNER_JOB_CONTAINER_DOCKER_HOST	<empty>	If empty, the available docker host is located automatically. If set to -, the available docker host is located automatically, but the docker host won't be mounted to the job containers. If it's any other value, the specified docker host will be used.
GITEA_RUNNER_JOB_CONTAINER_NETWORK	bridge	Docker network to use with job containers. Can be bridge, host, none, or the name of a custom network
GITEA_RUNNER_JOB_CONTAINER_PRIVILEGED	false	Whether to run jobs in containers with privileged mode which is required for Docker-in-Docker aka dind
GITEA_RUNNER_JOB_CONTAINER_OPTIONS	<empty>	Additional container launch options (eg, --add-host=my.gitea.url:host-gateway)
GITEA_RUNNER_JOB_CONTAINER_WORKDIR_PARENT	/workspace	The parent directory of a job's working directory.
GITEA_RUNNER_JOB_CONTAINER_FORCE_PULL	false	Pull docker images even if already present
GITEA_RUNNER_JOB_TIMEOUT	3h	The maximum time a job can run before it is cancelled
GITEA_RUNNER_ENV_VAR_N_NAME	<empty>	Name of the N-th extra environment variable to be passed to Job containers, e.g. GITEA_RUNNER_ENV_VAR_1_NAME=MY_AUTH_TOKEN
GITEA_RUNNER_ENV_VAR_N_VALUE	<empty>	Value of the N-th extra environment variable to be passed to Job containers, e.g. GITEA_RUNNER_ENV_VAR_1_VALUE=SGVsbG8gbXkgZnJpZW5kIQ==
GITEA_RUNNER_VALID_VOLUME_N	<empty>	Volumes (including bind mounts) that are allowed to be mounted into job containers. Glob syntax is supported, e.g. GITEA_RUNNER_VALID_VOLUME_1=/src/*.json
GITEA_RUNNER_HOST_WORKDIR_PARENT	/data/cache/actions	The parent directory of a job's working directory. (Path to cache cloned actions)

Embedded cache server:

Name	Default Value	Description
ACT_CACHE_SERVER_ENABLED	true	Enable the use of an embedded or external cache server with actions/cache in jobs
ACT_CACHE_SERVER_EXTERNAL_URL	<empty>	URL to an external cache server. If specified, act_runner will use this URL as the ACTIONS_CACHE_URL instead of starting an embedded server. The URL should end with "/".
ACT_CACHE_SERVER_DIR	/data/cache/server	The directory to store the cache data
ACT_CACHE_SERVER_HOST	<empty>	The IP address or hostname via which the job containers can reach the cache server. Leave empty for automatic detection
ACT_CACHE_SERVER_PORT	0	The TCP port of the cache server. 0 means to use a random, available port

License

All files in this repository are released under the Apache License 2.0.

Individual files contain the following tag instead of the full license text:

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0

This enables machine processing of license information based on the SPDX License Identifiers that are available here: https://spdx.org/licenses/.