GitHub Actions Runner Manager (garm)

Welcome to garm!

Garm enables you to create and automatically maintain pools of self-hosted GitHub runners, with autoscaling that can be used inside your github workflow runs.

The goal of garm is to be simple to set up, simple to configure and simple to use. It is a single binary that can run on any GNU/Linux machine without any other requirements other than the providers it creates the runners in. It is intended to be easy to deploy in any environment and can create runners in any system you can write a provider for. There is no complicated setup process and no extremely complex concepts to understand. Once set up, it's meant to stay out of your way.

Garm supports creating pools on either GitHub itself or on your own deployment of GitHub Enterprise Server. For instructions on how to use garm with GHE, see the credentials section of the documentation.

Join us on slack

Whether you're running into issues or just want to drop by and say "hi", feel free to join us on slack.

Installing

Build from source

You need to have Go installed, then run:

go install github.com/cloudbase/garm/cmd/garm@latest
go install github.com/cloudbase/garm/cmd/garm-cli@latest

This will install the garm binaries in $GOPATH/bin folder. Move them somewhere in your $PATH to make them available system-wide.

If you have docker/podman installed, you can also build statically linked binaries by running:

git clone https://github.com/cloudbase/garm
cd garm
git checkout release/v0.1
make build-static

The garm and garm-cli binaries will be built and copied to the bin/ folder in your current working directory.

Install the service

Add a new system user:

useradd --shell /usr/bin/false \
    --system \
    --groups lxd \
    --no-create-home garm

The lxd group is only needed if you have a local LXD install and want to connect to the unix socket to use it. If you're connecting to a remote LXD server over TCP, you can skip adding the garm user to the lxd group.

Copy the binary to somewhere in the system $PATH:

sudo cp $(go env GOPATH)/bin/garm /usr/local/bin/garm

Or if you built garm using make:

sudo cp ./bin/garm /usr/local/bin/garm

Create the config folder:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/garm

Copy the config template:

sudo cp ./testdata/config.toml /etc/garm/

Copy the systemd service file:

sudo cp ./contrib/garm.service /etc/systemd/system/

Change permissions on config folder:

sudo chown -R garm:garm /etc/garm
sudo chmod 750 -R /etc/garm

Enable the service:

sudo systemctl enable garm

Customize the config in /etc/garm/config.toml, and start the service:

sudo systemctl start garm

Installing external providers

External providers are binaries that GARM calls into to create runners in a particular IaaS. There are currently two external providers available:

• OpenStack
• Azure

Follow the instructions in the README of each provider to install them.

Configuration

The garm configuration is a simple toml. The sample config file in the testdata folder is fairly well commented and should be enough to get you started. The configuration file is split into several sections, each of which is documented in its own page. The sections are:

• The default section
• Metrics
• JWT authentication
• API server
• Github credentials
• Providers
• Database

Once you've configured your database, providers and github credentials, you'll need to configure your webhooks and the callback_url.

At this point, you should be done. Have a look at the running garm document for usage instructions and available features.

If you would like to use garm with a different IaaS than the ones already available, have a look at the writing an external provider page.

If you like to optimize the startup time of new instance, take a look at the performance considerations page.

Write your own provider

The providers are interfaces between garm and a particular IaaS in which we spin up GitHub Runners. These providers can be either native or external. The native providers are written in Go, and must implement the interface defined here. External providers can be written in any language, as they are in the form of an external executable that garm calls into.

There is currently one native provider for LXD and two external providers for Openstack and Azure.

If you want to write your own provider, you can choose to write a native one, or implement an external one. The easiest one to write is probably an external provider. Please see the Writing an external provider document for details. Also, feel free to inspect the two available external providers in this repository.