The runner is the application that runs a job from a GitHub Actions workflow. It is used by GitHub Actions in the hosted virtual environments, or you can self-host the runner in your own environment.

For more information about installing and using self-hosted runners, see Adding self-hosted runners and Using self-hosted runners in a workflow

Runner releases:

Pre-reqs | Download

Pre-reqs | Download

Pre-reqs | Download

Thank you for your interest in this GitHub repo, however, right now we are not taking contributions.

We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in.

We are taking the following steps to better direct requests related to GitHub Actions, including:

1. We will be directing questions and support requests to our Community Discussions area

2. High Priority bugs can be reported through Community Discussions or you can report these to our support team https://support.github.com/contact/bug-report.

3. Security Issues should be handled as per our SECURITY.md

We will still provide security updates for this project and fix major breaking changes during this time.

You are welcome to still raise bugs in this repo.

A full Rust rewrite of the GitHub Actions Runner lives in the rust/ directory. It is a Cargo workspace containing six crates that mirror the original C# project structure.

rust/
├── Cargo.toml                  # Workspace root
└── crates/
    ├── runner-sdk/             # Foundation: process invoker, HTTP client, utilities
    ├── runner-common/          # Shared services: HostContext, config, IPC, logging
    ├── runner-worker/          # Execution engine: job/step runners, action handlers
    ├── runner-listener/        # Main process: message loop, job dispatch, self-update
    ├── runner-plugins/         # Artifact upload/download plugins
    └── runner-plugin-host/     # Out-of-process plugin executor

# Debug build (fast compile, unoptimised)
cd rust
cargo build

# Release build (optimised)
cargo build --release

The two main binaries are produced at:

cd rust
cargo test

# 1. Configure the runner (interactive)
./target/release/Runner.Listener configure \
  --url https://github.com/<owner>/<repo> \
  --token <REGISTRATION_TOKEN>

# 2. Start listening for jobs
./target/release/Runner.Listener run

The same flags from the C# runner are supported:

Rust makes cross-compilation straightforward. Add the target and build:

rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

rustup target add aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
cargo build --release --target aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

rustup target add x86_64-apple-darwin
cargo build --release --target x86_64-apple-darwin

cd rust
cargo fmt --all

cd rust
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets