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.

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.

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.

The support for custom features in Dev Containers is a huge improvement to the process of customizing images quickly and easily. The convenience and simplicity can have a cost – performance. Trying to customize a container using a feature recently, I struggled with an incredibly long build time. This is how I improved the process.

Git’s safe directory configuration helps to protect users, but it can create challenges. This is especially true when using Hugo with Azure Static Web Sites. In that case, you’re dealing with an Action that bind-mounts the source code into a container. This requires some special handling.

BuildKit provides native support for caching layers to improve build times. In this post, we’ll explore implementing gha, inline, and registry caches with GHCR and GitHub Actions.

The third and final part of our exploration of Features and creating a simple feature. Now it’s time to dive deeper into Linux scripting to create an entrypoint for the non-root users.