runs-on: label

To tell GitHub to run your workflow jobs using Sprinters on AWS instead of GitHub hosted runners, locate the runs-on: label in your workflow yml:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Lookup your 12-digit AWS account ID (ex.: 123456789012) and adjust it to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest

Congratulations! Your GitHub Actions job is fully set up and will execute with Sprinters on AWS going forward.

See it in action

Label

The label lets you directly control where your jobs run, on what instance type they run, what image they use and how much temp storage they get.

For Sprinters at the bare minimum it looks like this:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest

The label in the example above tells Sprinters to connect to AWS account 123456789012 (using the default sprinters-role role) and launch a runner instance using the ubuntu-latest image, which is identical to the one provided by GitHub.

A number of defaults will also be applied automatically to most closely matches the capacity of GitHub hosted runners:

• The instance will be a t3.large (x64 with 2 vCPUs).
• It will have 14 GiB of temp disk space and 4 GiB of swap.

The instance placement will be as follows:

• It will be launched in the us-east-1 region in your account’s default VPC.
• Sprinters will automatically pick the availability zone that currently has the lowest spot price.
• Sprinters will attempt to launch the instance as spot and automatically fall back to on-demand if AWS has insufficient spot capacity available.

Customization

This specification can be customized by adding various parts to the label. The order doesn’t matter. All parts are separated by a colon (:).

Here is a more complex example:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/111122223333/my-custom-role-name:ubuntu-22.04:eu-central-1/subnet-0123456789abcdef0:m7i.24xlarge:temp=64

Sprinters will connect to the 111122223333 AWS account using the cross-account role named my-custom-role-name and launch a runner using the ubuntu-22.04 image in the eu-central-1 region within the subnet-0123456789abcdef0 subnet on a m7i.24xlarge instance with 64 GiB of temp space.

Parts

The following label parts can be added or modified to customize the image, placement and capacity of the runner instance:

• AWS Account (Account ID / IAM Role Name)
• Image
• AWS Placement (Region / VPC / Availability Zone / Subnet)
• AWS Instance Type
• AWS Spot Instances
• AWS Instance Profile
• Temp Disk Space
• Swap Disk Space

AWS Account (Account ID / IAM Role Name)

You must include the AWS account ID where the runner instance is launched in the label.

Optionally you can also customize the name of IAM Role that Sprinters uses to connect to your AWS account by appending it to the label.

Format: aws/aws-account-id/iam-role-name
Default: aws/aws-account-id/sprinters-role

Examples

To use the 112233445566 AWS account ID and the default sprinters-role role name, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/112233445566:ubuntu-latest

To use the 112233445566 AWS account ID and my-custom-role-name as the role name, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/112233445566/my-custom-role-name:ubuntu-latest

Image

You can set the image for the runner by replacing the one in the label.

Format: image-name
Default: ubuntu-latest

Supported x64 Image Types

Supported arm64 Image Types

Example

To set the image to minimal, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:minimal

AWS Placement (Region / VPC / Availability Zone / Subnet)

You can specify where the runner instance is launched by appending a placement config to the label.

This placement config specifies the region, availability zone and subnet id of the instance. At least one of region and availability zone must be specified. subnet id is optional. All parts are separated by a /.

Format: aws-region/aws-availability-zone/aws-subnet-id
Default: us-east-1 (random subnet of a random availability zone of the default VPC of us-east-1)

Supported Regions

More regions will be added soon. To request support for a specific region, file an issue in the issue tracker.

Notes

• If you specify both a region and an availability zone, you must ensure the availability zone resides in that region.
• If you don’t specify a region, Sprinters will automatically select the matching region for the availability zone.
• If you specify both a region and a subnet id, you must ensure the subnet resides in that region.
• If you specify both an availability zone and a subnet id, you must ensure the subnet resides in that availability zone.

Examples

To set the region to eu-central-1 and run using the minimal image, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:minimal:eu-central-1

To use the eu-central-1c availability zone, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest:eu-central-1c

To use the subnet-0123456789abcdef0 subnet in the us-east-1 region, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:us-east-1/subnet-0123456789abcdef0:ubuntu-latest

AWS Instance Type

You can set the AWS EC2 instance type on which launch the runner by appending it to the label.

Format: aws-instance-type
Default: t3.large

Supported x64 Instance Types

Supported arm64 Instance Types

More instance families will be added soon. To request support for a specific instance family, file an issue in the issue tracker.

Example

To set the instance type to m7i.8xlarge, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest:m7i.8xlarge

AWS Spot Instances

To save significant amounts of money at a slight risk of being interrupted, the instance can be launched as a spot instance.

Format: spot=auto|true|false
Default: auto

Supported Modes

Note

If neither a subnet id nor an availability zone was specified, Sprinters will automatically select the availability zone with the cheapest spot price.

Example

To force the use of much cheaper spot instances, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest:spot=true

AWS Instance Profile

To access resources in your AWS account without the need to store long-lived AWS credentials as GitHub Actions secrets, you can associate an IAM instance profile with your runner instance. The instance will then automatically have AWS credentials available with the permissions of the IAM role linked to the instance profile.

Format: profile=instance-profile-name
Default: none

Example

To associate your instance with the my-instance-profile instance profile, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest:profile=my-instance-profile

See also: Accessing AWS Resources for more info.

Temp Disk Space

You can set the temp disk space available for the runner from 1 GiB to 16384 GiB by appending it to the label.

Format: temp=size-in-gib
Default: 14

Example

To set the temp disk space to 512 GiB, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest:temp=512

Swap Disk Space

You can set the swap size for the runner from 1 GiB to 16384 GiB by appending it to the label.

Format: swap=size-in-gib
Default: 4

Example

To set the swap size to 64 GiB, change the label to:

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest:swap=64