Managing self-hosted runners at scale
GitHub-hosted runners offer a turn-key environment for Actions workflows, but teams that need control over hardware, operating systems, or installed software have long been able to run their own runners. Until now, though, that management happened at the repository or organization level. Two new capabilities—enterprise self-hosted runners and self-hosted runner groups—extend that administrative model to the enterprise account and add fine-grained access controls.
Enterprise self-hosted runners
Enterprise-owned runners can be shared across every organization in an enterprise account. Registration follows the same flow used for repository- and organization-level runners, whether you configure them manually in the UI or register programmatically through the API.
As with other runner scopes, each enterprise runner accepts custom labels so workflows can select a specific runner at runtime by matching labels in a job's runs-on key.
Runner groups and access control
Self-hosted runner groups let administrators partition runners and define which organizations or repositories may use each group. This removes the need to grant every repository access to every runner when only a subset is required.
Runner groups are available for enterprise accounts and for organizations on a GitHub Enterprise plan.
For groups created at the enterprise level, access settings govern which organizations can use the group's runners: either all organizations in the account or a selected list. Groups created within an organization work the same way, with access controlled per repository.
Runner groups can be combined with custom labels for flexible, purpose-specific setups—for example, isolating a production deployment pool, keeping private and public projects separate, or reserving GPU-equipped runners for projects that need them.
Getting started
Documentation is available for adding enterprise runners and for managing access with runner groups. The self-hosted runner APIs cover registration and management programmatically. New to Actions? Free, self-paced courses such as GitHub Actions: Hello World are available at lab.github.com, and upcoming Actions features are tracked on the GitHub Roadmap.
