virtual-environments
Source code for creating VM images used by GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines hosted runners.
What is virtual-environments?
GitHub Actions Runner Images is the open-source repository containing the source code used to create the virtual machine images for GitHub-hosted runners in GitHub Actions and Microsoft-hosted agents in Azure Pipelines. It defines the operating systems, pre-installed software, and configurations that provide consistent build environments for CI/CD workflows. The project ensures these images are secure, up-to-date, and include the tools developers need for testing, building, and deploying applications.
Developers and DevOps engineers using GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines who rely on hosted runners for their CI/CD workflows and need to understand or customize the underlying build environment.
It offers transparency into the composition of official hosted runner images, provides a reference for building custom images, and allows the community to request tools or report issues, ensuring the environments are robust and meet common development needs.
Overview
GitHub Actions runner images
Use Cases
Best For
- Understanding what software is available on GitHub-hosted runners
- Building custom VM images based on the official configurations
- Requesting new tools or versions to be added to the hosted images
- Ensuring CI/CD workflow compatibility across different runner OS versions
- Tracking changes and updates to the runner image software
- Referencing image specifications for Azure Pipelines Microsoft-hosted agents
Not Ideal For
- Teams requiring Alpine Linux or other niche distributions for CI/CD pipelines
- Projects needing immutable, version-pinned environments for long-term reproducibility without automatic updates
- Organizations with air-gapped security policies that mandate fully self-hosted, offline runners
Pros & Cons
Pros
Includes a wide array of development tools, languages, and services out-of-the-box, with clear version management policies for popular tools like Java, Node.js, and Python, as detailed in the Software Support section.
Weekly updates are announced with pre-releases and a defined migration process for '-latest' labels, helping users plan for changes, as outlined in the Image Releases and Label Scheme sections.
Provides VM images for Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS across multiple versions and architectures (x64, arm64), catering to diverse development and testing needs, as shown in the Available Images table.
Users can request tools via issues and participate in discussions, ensuring the images evolve based on real-world needs, as described in the 'How to Interact with the Repo' section.
Cons
Only supports Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS; other Linux distributions are not available, forcing users to use Docker or self-hosted runners for niche needs, as admitted in the FAQs.
macOS image-generation CI doesn't accept external pull-requests yet, limiting community involvement and slowing down contributions for that platform, as noted in the FAQs.
Weekly software updates and the '-latest' label migration can introduce unexpected changes, requiring constant monitoring of announcements to maintain workflow stability, despite the transparency efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions
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