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Workflows using the ubuntu-latest runner label will soon run on Ubuntu-22.04.

Ubuntu 22.04 became generally available on GitHub-hosted runners in August 2022. Now Ubuntu-22.04 is ready to be the default version for the ubuntu-latest label in GitHub Actions workflows. This change will be rolled out over a period of 8 weeks beginning on October 1, 2022.

If you see any issues with your workflows when they are transitioned to Ubuntu-22.04:

• File an issue in the runner-images repository
• Switch back to Ubuntu 20.04 by specifying the ubuntu-20.04 runner label. We will continue to support Ubuntu 20.04.

Note that image software between Ubuntu-20.04 and Ubuntu-22.04 differs by the pre-installed and default versions versions of some tools. See the full list.

Customers can now deterministically restrict their workflows to run on a specific set of runners using the names of their runner groups in the runs-on key of their workflow YAML. This prevents the unintended case where your job runs on a runner outside your intended group because the unintended runner shared the same labels as the runners in your intended runner group.
Example of the new syntax to ensure a runner is targeted from your intended runner group:

runs-on:
  group: my-group
  labels: [ self-hosted, label-1 ]

In addition to the workflow file syntax changes, there are also new validation checks for runner groups at the organization level. Organizations will no longer be able to create runner groups using a name that already exists at the enterprise level. A warning banner will display for any existing duplicate runner groups at the organization level. There's no restriction on the creation of runner groups at the enterprise level.
This feature change applies to enterprise plan customers as only enterprise plan customers are able to create runner groups.

Starting today, customers can now enjoy larger runners without any pre-configuration work. GitHub now automatically creates a default runner group configured with four larger runners of our most popular sizes so users can start using larger runners right away.

The default runner group is called "Default Larger Runners" and can be managed by Organization or Enterprise admins. To begin using these runners, simply add the label corresponding to the runner of your choice to your workflow file.

Note that this change only applies to customers who are onboarded to the beta on October 20, 2022 and later.

Interested in learning more about larger hosted runners? Read the announcement here or sign up for the beta here

GitHub now supports using the -latest image label on your larger hosted runners. With the -latest label developers can be sure that their workflows use the latest available GA image in GitHub Actions.

In general the -latest tag is used for the latest OS image version that is GA. You can find more information about the different image versions in our runner-images repository.

Interested in learning more about larger hosted runners? Read the announcement here or sign up for the beta here.

24-July-2023 Update: Our telemetry shows significant usage of these commands so we have decided to postpone the removal. To learn more, visit the latest changelog post.

To avoid untrusted logged data to use save-stateand set-output workflow commands without the intention of the workflow author we have introduced a new set of environment files to manage state and output.

Starting today runner version 2.298.2 will begin to warn you if you use the save-state or set-output commands via stdout. We are monitoring telemetry for the usage of these commands and plan to fully disable them on 31st May 2023. Starting 1st June 2023 workflows using save-state or set-output commands via stdout will fail with an error. Our telemetry shows significant usage of these commands. Given the number of impacted customers we are postponing the removal.

Patching your actions and workflows

If you are using self-hosted runners make sure they are updated to version 2.297.0 or greater.

Action authors who are using the toolkit should update the @actions/core package to v1.10.0 or greater to get the updated saveState and setOutput functions.

Action and workflow authors who are using save-state or set-output via stdout should update to use the new environment files.

Examples

A workflow using save-state or set-output like the following

- name: Save state
run: echo "::save-state name={name}::{value}"

- name: Set output
run: echo "::set-output name={name}::{value}"

should be updated to write to the new GITHUB_STATE and GITHUB_OUTPUT environment files:

- name: Save state
run: echo "{name}={value}" >> $GITHUB_STATE

- name: Set output
run: echo "{name}={value}" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

macOS 12 became generally available on GitHub-hosted runners in June 2022. Over the next 10 weeks, jobs using the macos-latest runner label will migrate from macOS 11 to 12. During migration, you can determine if your job has migrated by viewing the Runner Image information in the Set up job step of your logs.

Start using GitHub Actions to build and publish apps for the Apple ecosystem by updating your jobs to include runs-on: macos-latest

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: macos-latest
     steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Build
        run: swift build
      - name: Run tests
        run: swift test

The macOS 12 runner image has different tools and tool versions than macOS 11. See the full list of changed software.

If you spot any issues with your workflows when using macOS 12, please let us know by creating an issue in the runner image repository.

Actions runner support for Windows ARM hardware, is now in public beta . This provides teams with the capability to run self-hosted Windows workflows in a Windows ARM64 runtime.

There are some limitations of the current beta product to be aware of:

• Windows ARM runners are currently using nodejs's "unofficial" win-arm64 builds
• Some first party actions will not work until a win-arm64 version of that language is released:
  • setup-node
  • Some first party actions don't support the arm64 architecture:
  • setup-python -issue tracking it here

For additional information on how to set up a self-hosted Windows ARM64 runner, please refer to our documentation. If you have any feedback or questions for Actions self-hosted Windows ARM support, you can submit an issue in the runner repository.

Additional information has been added to the payload of github.event for scheduled runs. Before this change, github.event for scheduled runs would only include the cron schedule. This change adds information about the repository, organization, and enterprise (when available).

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.

To see what’s next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.

GitHub Actions customers can now dynamically name their workflow runs. The new run-name feature will accept expressions and be displayed on the list of workflow runs.

For more information on how to use run-name, visit the documentation.

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.

To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.

Node 12 has been out of support since April 2022, as a result we have started the deprecation process of Node 12 for GitHub Actions. We plan to migrate all actions to run on Node16 by Summer 2023. We will monitor the progress of the migration and listen to the community for how things are going before we define a final date.
To raise awareness of the upcoming change, we are adding a warning into workflows which contain Actions running on Node 12. This will come into effect starting on September 27th.

What you need to do
For Actions maintainers: Update your actions to run on Node 16 instead of Node 12 (Actions configuration settings)
For Actions users: Update your workflows with latest versions of the actions which runs on Node 16 (Using versions for Actions)

Customers will now be able to use the GITHUB_TOKEN with workflow_dispatch and repository_dispatch events to trigger workflows. Prior to this change, events triggered by GITHUB_TOKEN would not create a new workflow run. This was done to prevent the accidental trigger of endless workflows. This update makes an exception for workflow_dispatch and repository_dispatch events since they are explicit calls made by the customer and not likely to end up in a loop.

name: Create Workflow Dispatch

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Trigger Workflow
        uses: actions/github-script@v6
        with:
          script: |
            github.rest.actions.createWorkflowDispatch({
              owner: context.repo.owner,
              repo: context.repo.repo,
              workflow_id: 'test.yml',
              ref: 'main',
            })

For more details see
Triggering a workflow from a workflow.

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.

To see what’s next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.

Today, we are announcing the public beta of larger GitHub hosted runners for GitHub Actions for Team and Enterprise plans 🎉 🎉

The new larger runners provide new capabilities for Team and Enterprise GitHub Action users:

• Linux and Windows machines up to 64 cores
• Fixed IP ranges to provide access to runners via allow list services
• Admin control over access to larger runners and concurrency

Larger machine sizes

Developers will be able to make use of machine sizes up to 64 cores on demand to run their workflows, billed by the job minute.

Fixed IP ranges

Setup a fixed IP range for your machines by simply ticking a check box, this provides an IP range that can be allow listed in internal systems and in GitHub’s allow list to keep using Actions while making your GitHub environment more secure.

Admin control

Admin’s can choose who can have access to larger machine sizes and at what concurrency, providing guard rails on spending

Larger machine pricing

Larger runners are charged for in both private and public repos and do not consume included minutes.
To learn more about the larger runner per job minute pricing, check out the updated pricing docs

To learn more about using the new larger runners, check out our docs

To see what’s next for Actions, visit our public roadmap

Reusable workflows can now be called from a matrix and other reusable workflows.

You can now nest up to 4 levels of reusable workflows giving you greater flexibility and better code reuse. Calling a reusable workflow from a matrix allows you to create richer parameterized builds and deployments.

Learn more about nesting reusable workflows.

Learn more about using reusable workflows with the matrix strategy..

For questions and feedback, visit the GitHub Actions community.

Ubuntu 22.04 is now generally available on GitHub-hosted runners. To use it now, simply add runs-on: ubuntu-22.04 in your workflow file. Otherwise, our recommendation is to use ubuntu-latest, which currently utilizes Ubuntu 20.04 but will begin running on Ubuntu 22.04 in the near future. This will ensure your workflows are always using a recent OS and removes the need to constantly update workflow files with image versions.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
      - name: Build
        run: dotnet build
      - name: Run tests
        run: dotnet test

The Ubuntu 22.04 runner image has different tools and tool versions than Ubuntu 20.04.

Read more on available runner images and beta images terms of use in our documentation.