GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners & new webhooks for auto-scaling

GitHub Actions now supports ephemeral (i.e. single job) self-hosted runners and a new workflow_job webhook to make autoscaling your runners easier. After a job is run, ephemeral runners are automatically unregistered from the service, allowing you to do any required post-job management.

Ephemeral runners are a good choice for self-managed environments where you need each job to run on a clean image. A runner is configured as ephemeral by adding the optional --ephemeral parameter during configuration. Learn more about registering ephemeral runners.

Example ephemeral runner registration:

$ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/octo-org --token example-token --ephemeral

Combine ephemeral runners with the new workflow_job webhook to automatically scale your self-hosted runners in response to your Actions job requests, including the runner labels from the runs-on: key from your workflow. Learn more about the workflow_job webhook and how to use it to autoscale your self-hosted runners.

Get started with automating the configuration of your self-hosted runners by following this automation guide in the runner repo.