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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

Our biggest GHA fees come from running on MacOS. Do you offer MacOS as a managed service (or plan to?) and how much cheaper is that than GitHub?

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Not for the foreseeable future.

Ubicloud runs on bare metal providers and they don't lease Mac hardware. Technically, we could run MacOS VMs on arm64. However, our interpretation of Apple's End User License Agreement (EULA) tells us that we can't do this.

This repo has some good references on the topic: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM?tab=readme-ov-file#is-this...

Would something like https://www.macstadium.com work for your use case?

That's exactly what we had looked at but we didn't want to be in the business of maintaining our own instances. We just want to use the GH runner part.

Biggest issue with MacOS is that it requires a physical Mac (not virtualization) and IIRC the licening from Apple requires a minimum "rental" period of 24 hours or something like that

Edit: the TOS for OS X says this:

3. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services. A. Leasing. You may lease or sublease a validly licensed version of the Apple Software in its entirety to an individual or organization (each, a “Lessee”) provided that all of the following conditions are met: (i) the leased Apple Software must be used for the sole purpose of providing Permitted Developer Services and each Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms of this License; (ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;

What I did for work was, getting a Mac Mini and set up multiple self hosted runners in Tmux (very hackish, I know). The builds became faster (and cheaper) because each run no longer had to download the dependencies again.

Of course, hosting myself means I also gotta own the uptime of it..

How does Github Actions get away with this? They certainly don't bill and provide the machine for 24 hours for each CI run.

We support GitHub MacOS 13 runners on M2 Pros at WarpBuild [1]. They're about 25% faster and 50% cheaper per minute compared to the equivalent GitHub hosted runners.

[1] https://docs.warpbuild.com/runners#macos-m2-pro-on-arm64

Any timeline for supporting repositories in personal accounts? I'm willing to create an organization and move the repository, but I won't bother if it's right around the corner. macOS ARM runners are a gamechanger given the offensively high pricing GitHub offers them at.

Have you seen this announcement by GitHub regarding Apple Silicon:

https://github.blog/changelog/2024-01-30-github-actions-intr... ?

Today, GitHub is excited to announce the launch of a new M1 macOS runner! This runner is available for all plans, free in public repositories, and eligible to consume included free plan minutes in private repositories. The new runner executes Actions workflows with a 3 vCPU, 7 GB RAM, and 14 GB of storage VM, which provides the latest Mac hardware Actions has to offer. The new runner operates exclusively on macOS 14 and to use it, simply update the runs-on key in your YAML workflow file to macos-14.

I had not seen it--thank you!

We're not prioritizing personal accounts at this point, one of the reasons being to limit spammy accounts. Sorry about the hassle - you sound like a genuine user.

No worries. I've already created the organization; I doubt this will impact many serious users. I look forward to seeing your new Mac support on HN as a top level submission. Since GitHub doesn't give free macOS ARM minutes at all, this should be immediately interesting to anyone running such builds.

Nice, I don't think you supported them last I looked. I'll be glad to get off GH's mac runners which are straight garbage, like it's embarrassing or it should be for them. The sheer audacity to charge 10x the linux runners and still be so slow... At 10x price they are 2x+ slower than the linux runners for doing the same thing (checking out repo, installing dependencies, running webpack).

That is correct. We went live with them about a week ago. Will likely introduce it to the HN friends in the next couple of days.

I agree with the stuff you've mentioned, obviously, but also empathize a bit with the GitHub folks because of all the licences and limitations Mac runners come with.

The perf for comparable operations is squarely on them though.

I'm curious what you need macOS for if you're doing a JS project. Is it Electron?

Cross platform app development using JS (TS). Quasar is the framework I use. I build my Android apps on linux but need macOS to build the iOS apps.

Thanks! Hadn't heard of Quasar, looks cool though.

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