actions

Enabling caching by default has demonstrated improved workflow performance, and can reduce build times by 20-40% for repositories with dependencies greater than 100 MB! This change has been made to the latest setup-go Action(V4). Developers no longer have to specify the cache: true parameter in their YAML file to obtain the benefits of caching. For more information on building, testing, and caching dependencies with Go, check out the docs here!

In addition to Ubuntu & Windows, GitHub Actions now attaches a SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) to hosted runner image releases for macOS. In the context of GitHub Actions hosted runners, an SBOM details the software pre-installed on the virtual machine that is running your Actions workflows. This is useful in the situation where there is a vulnerability detected, you will be able to quickly tell if you are affected or not. If you are building artifacts, you can include this SBOM in your bill of materials for a comprehensive list of everything that went into creating your software.

To check out the new files, head over to the runner-images repository release page now or check out our docs for more information.

Starting on March 15, 2023, GitHub Team plan customers will be able to create, manage and delete runner groups to better manage their hosted and self hosted runners.

Enterprise customers will continue to have access to this feature at the Organisation and Enterprise level.

Starting on March 08, 2023, GitHub Enterprise customers using 2-core GitHub-hosted Linux and Windows runners will have the job concurrency on Windows/Linux increased from 180 to 500.

Enterprise customers need to make no changes to take advantage of this increased concurrency. If you require higher concurrency on 2-Core GitHub-hosted Linux and Windows runners than 500, please reach out to GitHub support.

People on the paid Team and Enterprise plans can now sign up for a beta to get access to new and powerful macOS runners for x64. Access is requested via the beta sign-up page. Once your request has been approved, an email will be sent with additional details. The new XL runner option provides developers with 12 cores to execute their Actions workflows on and improve build times.

To learn more visit the docs. Information on pricing for the new macOS XL runner is here.

Starting on February 23, 2023, Actions users of GitHub-hosted larger Linux runners will be able to make use of hardware acceleration for Android testing. Testing on a 4-core machine with hardware acceleration is around 2-3 times faster than not using hardware acceleration and around 2 times faster than using MacOS.

To make use of this on Linux, Actions users will need to add the runner user to the KVM user group

      - name: Enable KVM group perms
        run: |
            echo 'KERNEL=="kvm", GROUP="kvm", MODE="0666", OPTIONS+="static_node=kvm"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-kvm4all.rules
            sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
            sudo udevadm trigger --name-match=kvm

(Thank you gsauthof for the feedback on this!)

You will then be able to make use of hardware acceleration when making use of Android emulator actions such as reactivecircus/android-emulator-runner.

Starting on February 14, 2023, users of GitHub-hosted larger runners will no longer be able to add, edit or remove additional labels on existing or new runners. Customers will continue to be able to use the runner group as a runs-on target to use ‘groups’ of larger runners. This provides a more determinstic approach to targetting groups of machines compared to labels and aligns with our future work to improve the runner management experience.

Existing runners with additional labels will continue to support these labels, if you wish to remove these you will need to delete the runner and create a new one with the same name. Users will continue to be able to target their runners using the runner name as the default label.