What are the differences between image used for GH Runners and Self-hosted runners?

[simpson]

I recently got the ARC runners set working with a lot of trial and error. The issue I'm facing now is that all of my builds work fine when using GH hosted runners (runs-on: ubuntu-latest), but when I shift to using my runner set the builds fail because it seems like there aren't the same packages installed (Ex. Python).

Are the differences in the GH image and the image that ARC runners use documented anywhere to understand the differences? Why not just use the same image? I'm using the latest action-runner image as far as I can tell.

Thanks!

  spec:
    containers:
      - name: runner
        image: ghcr.io/actions/actions-runner:latest
        command: ["/home/runner/run.sh"]
        resources:
          requests:
            memory: "12G"
          limits:
            memory: "16G"

[Moser-ss]

If you are talking about the difference between the GitHub Hosted Runners and the Self-hosted runners, the difference is huge. The GitHub Hosted runners have a ton of software (check the GitHub Hosted Runner page ), and it is Ubuntu, while the actions-runner image only has a few libs and is Debian

The runner image already contains more stuff and it is ubuntu

[simpson]

It is a tragedy that ARC went with Debian instead of Ubuntu, hopefully they fix that soon or it is completely useless for anyone that uses Actions Marketplace

[Moser-ss]

In reality nothing stop you to create your on image

[crohr]

It is a tragedy that ARC went with Debian instead of Ubuntu, hopefully they fix that soon or it is completely useless for anyone that uses Actions Marketplace

@simpson Agreed, I don't understand why people inflict themselves with the pain of ARC, docker-in-docker, or messing with custom base images. That's why I built RunsOn to fix this and provide 1-1 compatibility with official GitHub Runner images.