Larger runners reference

Find information about larger runners, including their specifications and customization options.

Machine sizes for larger runners

You can choose from several specifications for larger runners.

Specifications for general larger runners

Specifications for GPU larger runners

Runner images

Larger runners run on virtual machines (VMs), and GitHub installs a virtual hard disk (VHD) on this machine during the VM creation process. You can choose from different VM images to install on your runners.

GitHub-owned images: These images are maintained by GitHub and are available for Linux (x64 and arm64), Windows (x64 and arm64), and macOS (x64 and arm64) runners. For more information on these images and a full list of included tools for each runner operating system, see the GitHub Actions Runner Images repository.

Partner Images: Partner images are not managed by GitHub and are pulled from the Azure Marketplace. See below for resources on where to find more information and to report issues for partner images.

• Base Windows 11 desktop image.
• NVIDIA GPU-Optimized VMI
• Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019.

Available macOS larger runners and labels

The following machines are available for macOS larger runners. When you create a macOS larger runner, the runner name is also available as a workflow label that you can use with runs-on.

Limitations for macOS larger runners

• All actions provided by GitHub are compatible with arm64 GitHub-hosted runners. However, community actions may not be compatible with arm64 and need to be manually installed at runtime.
• Nested-virtualization is not supported due to the limitation of Apple's Virtualization Framework.
• Networking capabilities such as Azure private networking and assigning static IPs are not currently available for macOS larger runners.
• The arm64 macOS runners do not have a static UUID/UDID assigned to them because Apple does not support this feature. However, Intel MacOS runners are assigned a static UDID, specifically 4203018E-580F-C1B5-9525-B745CECA79EB. If you are building and signing on the same host you plan to test the build on, you can sign with a development provisioning profile. If you do require a static UDID, you can use Intel runners and add their UDID to your Apple Developer account.

Troubleshooting larger runners

If you notice the jobs that target your larger runners are delayed or not running, there are several factors that may be causing this.

• Concurrency settings: You may have reached your maximum concurrency limit. If you would like to enable more jobs to run in parallel, you can update your autoscaling settings to a larger number. See Managing larger runners.
• Repository permissions: Ensure you have the appropriate repository permissions enabled for your larger runners. By default, enterprise runners are not available at the repository level and must be manually enabled by an organization administrator. See Managing larger runners.
• Billing information: You must have a valid credit card on file in order to use larger runners. After adding a credit card to your account, it can take up to 10 minutes to enable the use of your larger runners. See Managing your payment and billing information.
• Spending limit: Your GitHub Actions spending limit must be set to a value greater than zero. See Setting up budgets to control spending on metered products.
• Fair use policy: GitHub has a fair use policy that begins to throttle jobs based on several factors, such as how many jobs you are running or how many jobs are running across the entirety of GitHub Actions.
• Job queue to assign time: Job queue to assign time refers to the time between a job request and GitHub assigning a VM to execute the job. Standard GitHub-hosted runners utilizing prescribed YAML workflow labels (such as ubuntu-latest) are always in a "warm" state. With larger runners, a warm VM may not be ready to pick up a job on first request as the pools for these machines are smaller. As a result, GitHub may need to create a new VM, which increases the queue to assign time. Once a runner is in use, VMs are ready for subsequent workflow runs within 5 minutes. If not used again within that time, a subset of those machines remains warm, reducing the queue to assign time for future workflow runs over the next 24 hours. The higher the volume of jobs you run, the more VMs will remain in the warm pool.

Networking for larger runners

By default, larger runners receive a dynamic IP address that changes for each job run. Optionally, GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers can configure their larger runners to receive static IP addresses from GitHub's IP address pool. For more information, see About GitHub's IP addresses.

When enabled, instances of the larger runner will receive IP addresses from specific ranges that are unique to the runner, allowing you to use the ranges to configure a firewall allowlist. Each larger runner is a pool that automatically scales out to its configured maximum concurrency, and all jobs in that pool share the same static IP address range. This means you do not need to create additional runners to run more concurrent jobs. You can use up to 10 larger runner pools with static IP address ranges in total across all your larger runners. For more information, see Managing larger runners.

If you would like to use more than 10 larger runner pools with static IP address ranges, please contact us through the GitHub Support portal.

Communication requirements for larger runners

A larger runner must establish connections to GitHub-owned endpoints to perform essential communication operations. In addition, your runner may require access to additional networks that you specify or utilize within an action.

To ensure proper communications for larger runners between networks within your configuration, ensure that the following communications are allowed.

Needed for essential operations:

github.com
api.github.com
*.actions.githubusercontent.com

Needed for downloading actions:

codeload.github.com

Needed for uploading/downloading job summaries, logs, workflow artifacts, and caches:

results-receiver.actions.githubusercontent.com
*.blob.core.windows.net

Needed for runner version updates:

objects.githubusercontent.com
objects-origin.githubusercontent.com
github-releases.githubusercontent.com
github-registry-files.githubusercontent.com

Needed for retrieving OIDC tokens:

*.actions.githubusercontent.com

Needed for downloading or publishing packages or containers to GitHub Packages:

*.pkg.github.com
pkg-containers.githubusercontent.com
ghcr.io

Needed for Git Large File Storage

github-cloud.githubusercontent.com
github-cloud.s3.amazonaws.com

Needed for jobs for Dependabot updates

dependabot-actions.githubapp.com

Needed for downloading release assets:

release-assets.githubusercontent.com

Needed for VNet:

api.snapcraft.io
*.core.windows.net