Self-hosted runners are also useful when debugging weird behaviour in a GitHub Action.

I do it by spinning up a VM on my local pc, then running the GitHub Actions software in the VM.

This gives a fully working GitHub Actions runner which I can ssh into directly and muck around with to investigate and get things working.

It's also easy to ensure only the right jobs end up on my runner.

The installer for the GitHub Actions runner asks for optional tag names to use, so I add "jc" (my initials) to the tags.

Then I add a matching "jc" to the "runs-on" clause in the workflow in my fork or PR:

    runs-on: [self-hosted, linux, x64, jc]

With that, the GitHub Actions for that workflow only run on my local VM.

Works pretty well. :)

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Official docs for the labelling bit: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...