GitHub’s Actions Runner Controller (ARC) offers a lot of great features, including metrics. These metrics give you visibility to the processing queue as well as the performance of runners and jobs. Enabling this feature is surprisingly easy. This post will show you how.

With the rise of OIDC, we no longer need to rely on secret keys or passwords to connect two services together. Instead, we can configure a trust relationship between the services and use that to securely request tokens for accessing resources. Adopting this approach can simplify things, but it can be scary for security teams and developers; they want to understand what makes this process work. In this post, walk through what’s happening under the covers.

I like having my SSH commit signing automatically configured. In a previous article, I discussed how you can do this using your dotfiles repository. If you want to add support for reading the SSH keys from 1Password, then there are just a few more things you need to know.

I’ve seen lots of teams trying to increase the availability of GitHub runners for their organization by implementing GitHub Actions Runner Controller (ARC). In some cases, they hope to try to exceed GitHub’s 99.9% SLA. Unfortunately, the math works against them. In this post, I’ll explain why.

One challenge with the GitHub’s Actions Runner Controller (ARC) is that it does not officially support Windows containers for the runners. With a little bit of work, though, it’s possible to make this configuration work on a hybrid Linux/Windows cluster.

With automation you can simplify many things as a developer. This includes automating the process of configuring commit signing with dotfiles.

Creating a well-organized build or release workflow is both an art and a science. Done properly, the process can be testable and maintainable, able to work on any CI/CD system. Like many things in software, there’s even a pattern that helps!

Looking to maintain virtual machine or Docker images in the most efficient way possible? Trying to build an image for GitHub ARC and needing to ensure you’re always using the latest available base image and runner? Then what you need is an Image Factory.

It’s not unusual for teams to want to merge the same branch into multiple branches. If they create multiple pull requests from that branch to each of the other branches, they suddenly find that their Checks behave differently than expected and the branches start to share results. Understanding why this happens makes it easy to get Checks to behave as expected.

What you don’t know can hurt you, especially when it comes to code. Dependency chains can tend to have more security considerations than most people realize. In fact, most dependencies have far more abilities than most developers realize …