Runner providers
A runner provider is a service or autoscaler that starts a fresh runner for each queued job and throws it away afterwards. This page says which ones work with GitCafe Actions.
GitCafe-hosted runners
GitCafe's own hosted runners (ubuntu-latest, ubuntu-24.04,
ubuntu-22.04) are started by GitCafe's fleet. The protocol the fleet uses
to learn about queued jobs is internal to GitCafe and closed to third
parties; you don't need to do anything to use hosted runners.
Third-party runner services
Services that run GitHub Actions jobs on their own machines connect to GitHub, not to GitCafe:
- Depot, Namespace and hosted Ubicloud serve github.com only.
- Blacksmith, WarpBuild and others that support GitHub Enterprise Server could serve GitCafe, but each needs to be set up by the vendor for your GitCafe server. None is available today.
A workflow whose runs-on names such a service's labels waits for a runner
until its run times out. Change runs-on to ubuntu-latest or to your own
self-hosted runners.
Autoscalers you run yourself
actions-runner-controller (ARC) with runner scale sets, terraform-aws-github-runner and RunsOn need GitHub's scale-set and webhook APIs, which GitCafe doesn't offer yet; they don't work with GitCafe.
To start a fresh machine for each job with your own tooling, use ephemeral or just-in-time runners: your script asks GitCafe for a JIT configuration, starts a machine with it, and the runner unregisters itself after one job.