Adding more Github Self-Hosted Runners

Adding more Github Self-Hosted Runners

January 18, 2022  -   2 mins read time -   310 words -  garrardkitchen

github self-hosted runner, linux, issue

Adding more GitHub Self-Hosted Runners

To help build out our numbers of GitHub Self-Hosted Runner, we took a shortcut and had cloned an existing Linux VM.

Unfortunately, the by-product of doing this resulted in (a) the clonee (source) Linux VM had their Self-Hosted hijacked by the new VM and (b) we had a Runner registered in GitHub that didn’t actually have a running runner - Offline 🤪.

Madness!

Ok, so what to do?…

These are the steps I worked thru to rectify this:

  • Firstly, remove Runner off of the new VM
  • Next, rerun the config.sh step on new VM
  • Finally, restart to Runner service on Clonee VM

First, let’s deal with the New VM

First of all, we need to remove the correct Runner service so I ran:

sudo systemctl | grep runner
...
sudo systemctl  | grep runner
  actions.runner.<org>.<hostname>.service                                                loaded active

I then copied the above service (actions.runner.<org>.<hostname>.service) name into clipboard and past in below (<service-name>)

systemctl stop <service-name>
systemctl disable <service-name>

Next, I returned to the GitHub portal and navigated to the Runners page and selected the new Runner. What I’m aiming to do here is to get a token that I can use to remove the Runner from the new VM:

I pressed the Remove button

then copied and executed this on the new VM:

./config.sh remove --token <redacted>

I re-ran the config.sh by:

./config.sh --url https://github.com/<org> --token <redacted>
sudo ./svc.sh install
sudo ./svc.sh start

At this point I saw the Self-Hosted Runner return to the GitHub Runners page - Showing as Idle and not as Offline.

Bring the Clonee back online

At this point, I could now longer see the Clonee’s hostname in the list of Runners.

I returned to the Clonee VM and ran:

cd actions-runners
sudo ./svc.sh start

This restarts the Runner as a service. It then became visible in the GitHub Runners page.