GitHub Self-Hosted Runner Packages and tools

[akshaymuralidharan-dlt]

Github Self Hosted Runner

Do we need to install each packages and tools we use in the github action manually inside the selfhosted VM. Or will it comes automatically while we configure the github runner?

Body

I have a GitHub workflow to build java application and build a docker image and push to Azure Container Registry. In the GitHub hosted runner the workflow is running fine.
I need to work the same in a Self Hosted runner. So I have created a VM in Azure and configured the Github runner and updated the workflow to run-on to selfhosted runner.

• name: Azure CLI script
  uses: azure/cli@v2
  with:
  azcliversion: latest
  inlineScript: |
  az account show

• name: Login to ACR
  uses: docker/login-action@v3
  with:
  registry: ${{ secrets.xxxxxxxxx }}
  username: ${{ secrets.xxxxxxxxx }}
  password: ${{ secrets.xxxxxxxxx }}

• name: Use Java 19
  uses: actions/setup-java@v2
  with:
  distribution: 'zulu'
  java-version: '19'

These are the examples of some github actions I use, this is working fine on the github runner. But when I change to GitHub runner to self hosted runner its showing errors

Error: Unable to locate executable file: az. Please verify either the file path exists or the file can be found within a directory specified by the PATH environment variable.

Error: Unable to locate executable file: docker. Please verify either the file path exists or the file can be found within a directory specified by the PATH environment variable.

When I login in to the VM and installed the azure cli manually the first error was gone.

So my question is do we need to install each packages and tools we use in the github action manually inside the selfhosted VM. Or will it comes automatically while we configure the github runner?

[slaven]

GitHub-hosted runners come with preinstalled software. For self-hosted runners you need to install all software, tools and packages yourself (unless it's already included with OS/image you're using). Good practice is to include install/update steps in workflow, then you can be sure your workflow is runner-agnostic.

[chrisjenx]

Understood, but I've installed ruby/pod/brew etc, but the github runner won't see these. These all got installed using the runner user via cli, so they are on the path.
How do we get self-hosted to see our installed binaries etc?

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