Skip to content

About Emcee Runners GitHub app#

Emcee Runners service provides high-efficient runners for your GitHub Actions through integration via GitHub application. Once installed, you will get:

  • unlimited runner usage by just setting runs-on: emcee-* in your jobs
  • faster workflows (comparing to GitHub‑hosted runners)
  • zero maintenance
  • macOS runners with pre-installed software

The number of available runners at a time is subject to your parallelization quota. You can easily scale up and down and reach desired cost-efficiency factors.

We wanted to make usage of Emcee Runners as easy as possible and created a single application for both organizations and personal accounts. Thus, the application requests permissions on organization level as well as repository level. On repository level we use only GitHub api related to runners registration.

Prerequisites#

You need to create an account at emcee.cloud. If not yet, proceed to registration process.

Before proceeding ensure you have successfully logged in at emcee.cloud.

If you don't know if you have a runners quota, please reach out to us to get free trial period activated.

Setting up#

Install GitHub app#

Proceed to Emcee Runners github page and install the application. Once installed, you'll be redirected to emcee.cloud where we bind GitHub app installation with your organization at emcee.cloud.

Keep in mind that organization at emcee.cloud might have only one installed GitHub application. If you want to try Emcee Runners with you personal GitHub account, creating a distinct testing account at emcee.cloud with dedicated quota is the best option.

Configure jobs to use Emcee Runners#

Specify a desired emcee-* image in the runs-on field to tell GitHub to run this job using Emcee Runners:

jobs:
  test:
    name: "Run Emcee Runners test job"
    runs-on: emcee-macos-14
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install emcee
        run: brew install avito-tech/tap/emcee-cloud
      - name: Check emcee-cloud installation
        run: emcee-cloud --version

Available images and tiers#

As for now we provide limited support of images and ties variation.

Only macos runner (emcee-macos-14) with default tier is now supported. Macos image is shipped with preinstalled Xcode and a broad range of other software you will likely need. Detailed list of software and versions you may find here.

Troubleshooting#

  • if you ended in a situation when GitHub app is installed but is not bound to your organization at emcee.cloud, reinstall the Emcee Runners application
  • if you accidentally bound GitHub app installation in your personal account to your organization at emcee.cloud, reach out to us and we'll start installation process over
  • if a public repository cannot access Emcee Runners that are added to the default runners group (id: 1), override this in organization's settings