If you’re going to build custom images for ARC or standalone VM runners, then you probably want to take some time to preload it with the tools that matter to your builds. If you want that process to work well for the GitHub-provided tools and actions/setup- Actions, then you’ll want to know how to prepopulate the runner’s tool cache.

Understanding ARC begins with understanding what it does (and does not do) to create runners on Kubernetes. The process is surprisingly straight-forward, and understanding it is key to mastering ARC.

The world of dev containers is constantly changing. Sometimes, even with community-driven specifications, there is a bit of room for interpretation. The initializeCommand lifecycle script is a great example of this, and the specification has been updated to align with the implementations. Learn how this affects your dev containers (and why your scripts should always be idempotent).

Whether you’re dealing with bad credentials or connectivity issues, there are a few tricks with Git that can make it easier to understand what’s happening. This post will dive into features of Git that you can use for understanding the credential flow and troubleshooting problems.

Sometimes you just need a little human interaction. And sometimes you need that to happen when you’re starting up a dev container so you can configure the environment. Thankfully, there is a way to get user input that works with most of the dev container implementations.

Ever needed to automate creating an Azure Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) application and federating it with GitHub? With just a little PowerShell, you can!

Continuing the discussion from last week, here are a few additional recommendations that can improve your ability to manage and scale your ARC deployments.

There are some common issues that lead to teams struggling to set up ARC. Nearly all of these can be avoided by following a few simple guidelines. In the first of a two-part post, I’ll outline some of my recommendations for improving your experience setting up ARC.

GitHub ARC is a great way to run your GitHub Actions runners in your own Kubernetes cluster. ARC has its own set of requirements and best practices. One of the most important best practices I recommend is to use a dedicated Kubernetes cluster. This post will explain why.

Security is at the heart of what we do in DevOps (if we’re doing it right). This includes protecting our CI/CD processes from malicious users and behaviors. One of the more interesting exploit vectors with build and release pipelines is a classic: the injection attack. This post reviews the basics of injection exploits and shows you how to easily avoid them.