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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

We build an Electron app for MacOS regularly. We run these builds on Github’s MacOS VMs.

The internet fails to connect when running yarn install about 3 out of every 5 times.

We’ve gotten multiple refunds for this issue, but it’s still a complete mess. Unfortunately we’ve built much of our process around GH Actions... if not I’m sure we would be on CircleCI or TravisCI already. We’ve also considered switching to self-hosted runners.

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We’re running everything on self-hosted runners and it works like a charm. They are also way, way faster than what GitHub can provide.

We get the advantages of the huge GitHub Actions ecosystem while having impressive (and fully controllable) performance and very easy access to out infrastructure for deployments.

What do you use to run the self-hosted runners?

In our case, we use a mac mini solely for building mobile applications via fastlane with a self-runner. Doing that with the GitHub runner on Mac would be mega expensive. The rest of the CI/test process runs on GitHub runners.

Does that work with M1/Apple Silicon Macs or Intel-only?

GitHub right now only has their self-hosted Mac runner released as an Intel Build, but it works fine through Rosetta, though running Apple Silicon Xcode might require some additional wrapping of commands with `arch` which might or might not be built into the pre-built action you're using.

We're currently using an Intel Mac we've used from before we migrated from Jenkins to GitHub actions, so your mileage may vary.

We're using https://next.yarnpkg.com/features/zero-installs, and it gets rid of one off issues like this (unless you have native deps which require an install).

Thank you for the link, looks interesting! I wish this were available in Yarn V1 :/

FWIW, GitHub Actions macs are MacStadium macs.

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