Overview of GitHub-hosted runners
Runners are the machines that execute jobs in a GitHub Actions workflow. For example, a runner can clone your repository locally, install testing software, and then run commands that evaluate your code.
GitHub provides runners that you can use to run your jobs, or you can host your own runners. With the exception of single-CPU runners, each GitHub-hosted runner is a new virtual machine (VM) hosted by GitHub. Single-CPU runners are hosted in a container on a shared VM—see GitHub-hosted runners reference.
Each runner comes with the runner application and other tools preinstalled. GitHub-hosted runners are available with Ubuntu Linux, Windows, or macOS operating systems. When you use a GitHub-hosted runner, machine maintenance and upgrades are taken care of for you.
You can choose one of the standard GitHub-hosted runner options or, if you are on the GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud plan, you can provision a runner with more cores, or a runner that's powered by a GPU processor. These machines are referred to as "larger runner." For more information, see Larger runners.
Larger runners also support custom images, which let you create and manage your own preconfigured VM images. For more information, see Custom images.
Using GitHub-hosted runners requires network access with at least 70 kilobits per second upload and download speeds.