Forgejo Runner

WARNING: this is alpha release quality code and should not be considered secure enough to deploy in production.

A daemon that connects to a Forgejo instance and runs jobs for continuous integration. The installation and usage instructions are part of the Forgejo documentation.

Reporting bugs

When filing a bug in the issue tracker, it is very helpful to propose a pull request in the end-to-end tests repository that adds a reproducer. It will fail the CI and unambiguously demonstrate that the problem exists. In most cases it is enough to add a workflow (see the echo example). For more complicated cases it is also possible to add a runner config file as well as shell scripts to setup and teardown the test case (see the service example).

Architectures & OS

The Forgejo runner is supported and tested on amd64 and arm64 (binaries and containers) on Operating Systems based on the Linux kernel.

Work may be in progress for other architectures and you can browse the corresponding issues to figure out how they make progress. If you are interested in helping them move forward, open an issue. The most challenging part is to setup and maintain a native runner long term. Once it is supported by Forgejo, the runner is expected to be available 24/7 which can be challenging. Otherwise debugging any architecture specific problem won't be possible.

• linux-s390x
• linux-powerpc64le
• linux-riscv64
• Windows

Hacking

The Forgejo runner is a dependency of the setup-forgejo action. See the full dependency graph for a global view.

Building

• Install Go and make(1)
• make build

The test workflow is a full example that builds the binary, runs the tests and launches the runner binary against a live Forgejo instance.

Generate mocks

• make deps-tools
• make generate

If there are changes, commit them to the repository.

Local debug

The repositories are checked out in the same directory:

• runner: Forgejo runner
• setup-forgejo: setup-forgejo

Install dependencies

The dependencies are installed manually or with:

setup-forgejo/forgejo-dependencies.sh

Build the Forgejo runner

cd runner ; rm -f forgejo-runner ; make forgejo-runner

Launch Forgejo and the runner

A Forgejo instance is launched with:

cd setup-forgejo
./forgejo.sh setup
firefox $(cat forgejo-url)

The user is root with password admin1234. The runner is registered with:

cd setup-forgejo
docker exec --user 1000 forgejo forgejo actions generate-runner-token > forgejo-runner-token
../runner/forgejo-runner register --no-interactive --instance "$(cat forgejo-url)" --name runner --token $(cat forgejo-runner-token) --labels docker:docker://node:22-bookworm,self-hosted:host,lxc:lxc://debian:bookworm

And launched with:

cd setup-forgejo ; ../runner/forgejo-runner --config runner-config.yml daemon

Note that the runner-config.yml is required in that particular case to configure the network in bridge mode, otherwise the runner will create a network that cannot reach the forgejo instance.

Try a sample workflow

From the Forgejo web interface, create a repository and add the following to .forgejo/workflows/try.yaml. It will launch the job and the result can be observed from the actions tab.

on: [push]
jobs:
  ls:
    runs-on: docker
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: |
          ls ${{ github.workspace }}