Select Topic Area

Product Feedback

Body

This is cross posted from here because I am unsure about where to post a feature request for Action Runner Sets. This board is where the "new issue" page directs us to, but it seems like the other place is where the conversations are really taking place. In any case...

Currently the Runner Set runner image ships with no more packages than are necessary. This makes it extremely awkward to develop workflows (especially public shared workflows) that run on both GitHub hosted runners and self-hosted runners, as you have to have the workflows install commands which are preinstalled on the GitHub hosted runners.

Obviously you want to slim the image down from the 20 GB of the GitHub hosted image to something that can be pulled all the time, and I'm not arguing for full feature parity, but please reconsider installing some extremely commonly used tools, such as

• git
• curl
• wget

It just seems insane on the face of it that we have to install git in an Official GitHub action runner image. Being able to retrieve files via curl and wget are so basic to bootstrapping anything else that the only argument I can see against including them is that they duplicate each other. Nevertheless, both are so popular (and small) that it seems needlessly dogmatic not to include them both.

I estimate that including just these 3 extra tools will cover 80% of the issues. I would prefer you also include jq, which, along with the other 3, would cover nearly all of my workflows, but I agree is not so basic.

The argument that we can build our own image neglects the fact that any marketplace or shared workflow that wants to be able to run on a self-hosted Runner Set must assume that only the tools on the official GitHub images are present. It also neglects the significant effort it takes to build, publish, and keep up-to-date a custom image.