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GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners & new webhooks for auto-scaling

GitHub Actions now supports ephemeral (i.e. single job) self-hosted runners and a new workflow_job webhook to make autoscaling your runners easier. After a job is run, ephemeral runners are automatically unregistered from the service, allowing you to do any required post-job management.

Ephemeral runners are a good choice for self-managed environments where you need each job to run on a clean image. A runner is configured as ephemeral by adding the optional --ephemeral parameter during configuration. Learn more about registering ephemeral runners.

Example ephemeral runner registration:

$ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/octo-org --token example-token --ephemeral

Combine ephemeral runners with the new workflow_job webhook to automatically scale your self-hosted runners in response to your Actions job requests, including the runner labels from the runs-on: key from your workflow. Learn more about the workflow_job webhook and how to use it to autoscale your self-hosted runners.

Get started with automating the configuration of your self-hosted runners by following this automation guide in the runner repo.

GitHub Actions: Experience refresh for the management of self-hosted runners

GitHub Actions now has an updated management experience for your self-hosted runners that makes it easier to manage runner groups and see the status of your runners. New Runners and Runner groups pages give you flexibility to get a summary view of your runners, or deep dive into a specific runner to edit it or see what job it may be currently running. You'll find both of these experiences in the Actions settings page of your repository or organization.

Runner List

Similarly, a new Runner groups page gives you a cleaner view of all the runner groups you've created, and how many runners are included in each one.

Runner Groups List

Learn more about self-hosting your runners for GitHub Actions.
Learn more about managing access to your runners with runner groups.

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Secret scanning: user-defined patterns now support editing

GitHub Advanced Security customers can now edit their custom patterns defined at the repository, organization, and enterprise levels. After a user edits and saves a pattern, secret scanning searches for matches both in a repository's entire git history and in any new commits. Editing a pattern will close alerts previously associated with the pattern if they no longer match the updated version.

The new editing feature comes along with other UI and UX updates, with additional improvements like dry-runs in the works.

Now that users can edit their patterns, we're also taking custom patterns out of beta on cloud. Over 50 enterprises have adopted the feature and written over 100 unique patterns since the initial release in June.

User-defined patterns will be generally available on server next quarter in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.3.

Learn more about custom patterns
Learn more about secret scanning

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